The Origin of Premodern Western Cities
Bret Devereaux writes about the origin of cities. He critiques a fantasy fiction-oriented YouTube vlogger who isn’t a trained historian, and in his critique, he expounds on the origin of cities, as coming purely from extraction, either by temples or by kings. I do not wish to contest Bret in Ancient history, where most of the examples in his post are drawn. But once one gets to the second millennium and cities are more visible to us in economic history, this is no longer the only origin of cities. Some emerge for commercial purposes, and only become sites of royal extraction after they’ve proven their economic value.
My training, to be clear, is not in history. But my work in transportation has compelled me to understand not just transport engineering but also urbanism and urban histories, and in practice this has meant the histories of the largest cities of the developed world today, skewed toward older ones (more London and Paris, less Seoul), which have had a longer period during which their specific histories were subjects of interest.
In economic history, DeLong-Shleifer argue in their article Princes and Merchants that in the second millennium, city growth in Europe correlated with non-absolutist government. This can include a constitutional government, such as the Old Swiss Confederacy, the Dutch Republic, and Britain after the Glorious Revolution, or unconsolidated states in which the king’s authority is checked by powerful magnates, such as France before the Bourbons. They argue that medieval and postmedieval Europe had an atypically rural elite, unlike the urban elite of the Ancient Mediterranean, and thus city size could be a proxy for commerce rather than imperial power. In fact, after finding the correlation, they tried running it again with royal capitals excluded, figuring that it would exclude large cities in economically inert areas like Naples and Madrid, but actually the correlation weakened, because it also excluded London and Paris.
London and Paris: city first, capital later
Bret gives two examples of cities with good locations for trade that nonetheless didn’t amount to much until they became imperial capitals: Byzantium, and Vienna. Byzantium’s transformation into Constantinople occurred centuries before the period of interest for this post; Vienna’s history is more complex, and is better viewed as a mix of imperial extraction and commercial importance; it only became the permanent Habsburg capital in 1611, at which point it was already a significant if sub-Paris-size city.
But in London and Paris, the history is one of city first, royal capital second. The English court was itinerant, and to the extent Anglo-Saxon England had a capital, it was Winchester. London became the Norman capital after it was already the largest English city, having grown as an important site of commerce and defense due to its location at the lowest crossing of the Thames and the presence of the preexisting Roman walls (themselves established for the same reason: the Thames crossing). Subsequently it grew as a commercial center, which drove the centralization of royal institutions around Westminster instead of the itinerant court – but also see below on the Angevin Empire.
Paris, unlike London, was a royal capital early. Its location on the Seine made for convenient crossings, but Roman and post-Roman Paris was not a particularly large city, and the presence of the royal court there after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the transformation of its western remnant into France made it big. But at the same time, the medieval Kingdom of France was extremely loosely governed. Half the country’s territory in the 12th century was part of the Angevin Empire, which also ruled England, more out of its French holdings than out of England; the Plantagenets only became more focused on England as France started pushing them out of nominally-French lands, finding England easier to administer and tax due to its greater centralization. Until the end of the 12th century, the direct holdings of the French crown didn’t extend far beyond Ile-de-France. Paris grew rapidly as France consolidated, but it was the largest city in France beforehand.
Pure trade: the Hanseatic League
London and Paris mixed commercial and political purposes; these were always intertwined in their histories from fairly early. In contrast, the main Hanseatic cities were far more trade-reliant. These formed based on trade network, and the larger ones petitioned for and received imperial immediacy, making them functionally independent, the Holy Roman Empire’s rule being quite loose. These were true city-states, relying on imported grain from areas that they by and large did not politically control, in contrast with the Greek poleis or the Renaissance Italian polities, the latter often called city-states but ruling land empires the scale of a modern Italian region or so.
Politics-first cities
To be clear, the examples of London and Paris, or for that matter Hamburg, are not the only ones one sees in premodern Europe. There’s really a spectrum of city foundations, from the entirely commercial to the entirely political. Madrid was built at an awkward location as the Spanish court centralized, which remains awkward to this day for high-speed rail planning, as Spanish cities are broadly either Madrid or on the coast, making it hard to serve more than one provincial city on the same line. Warsaw was a preexisting urban center but only became significant after Poland made it its capital because it was in the middle between the previous Polish capital of Kraków and Lithuania, shortly after the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was formed.
Early Modern foundations
Warsaw is an example of a city that had already been founded in the Middle Ages but exploded in size after it became the Commonwealth capital. But there are also cities founded ex nihilo in the Early Modern Period, at which point we must consider not just Europe but also the Americas. And those cities, again, are sited for a mix of political and economic considerations.
On the political side, one can find Karlsruhe and Charleroi, both founded to be aristocratic capitals, Karlsruhe because Margrave Charles III William wanted to get out of disputes with the citizens of the preexisting capital, and Charleroi for defense purposes as part of the Spanish Netherlands. Karlsruhe’s history, argues Jarrett Walker, makes it a uniquely good fit for its tram-train system: its modern size is such that it is monocentric but, owing to this history, its train station isn’t quite at the center. Far larger than both of these cities is Mexico City, refounded as a Spanish city because the Aztec capital had been there.
But then in North America one finds cities founded from the start at economically favorable locations. A consistent favorable location was the Fall Line, where ocean-going ships would have to transship to smaller riverboats; as all such cities lay on one line running north-south, it became easy to link them by road, eventually forming US Highway 1. Farther north, the Fall Line is very close to or even on the coast, leading to the foundation of New Amsterdam at a favorable harbor location. Since the original YouTube discusses realism in fantasy, I must point out that the concept of the fall line is familiar to fantasy worldbuilders, to the point that the D&D 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide gives a sample town for early adventures located on the falls of the river, with a low side and a high side. Ironically, this is a bit unrealistic for period medieval European fantasy, since this didn’t exist in Europe the way it did in the United States: European city locations on major rivers don’t really follow a consistent fall line, but rather are a mix of political reasons, preexisting trade routes, and favorable crossing locations.
London is a definitely example of the political capital being drawn to a commercial hub, with its position as a key continental gateway provided with heavy Roman defences. I believe the central fiscal bureaucracy had a meaningful Winchester presence for another century after the conquest despite the Court following Edward the Confessor to Westminster.
As for Paris, from what I’ve read, taken as its own polity the Royal Domain was always a comparatively formidable state with quite substantial fiscal resources and a strong agricultural base. It’s been theorized that Ile de France was a centre of a concentration of imperial estates in the Late Roman Empire, which made it an attractive base of operations for a number of the Merovingians after they defeated Syragrius and endowed the comital government there with a strong resource base in later history, making Paris worth attacking by the Danes and ensuring that the Counts had enough resources to defend the place, enhancing their prestige sufficiently for their dynasty to eventually replace the Carolingians.
So something of a chicken-and-egg issue going on with Paris, lost in the dim light of late antiquity.
Although its also interesting to wonder if the Carolingian dynastic history had gone the other way, they might of kept Austrasia as a capital region. Which would have had interesting consequences given that’s where the coal is.
I find the city of Aventicum in Switzerland fascinating, it was the capital of the Civitas Helvetiorum, and more important than Turicum (Zürich) or Genava. Today Avenches, is a town with less than 5000 inhabitants, with an amphitheatre that could host 16K people at the time.
Shifting trade routes and borders.
I love this topic, and it’s no surprise Alon is also an Unmitigated Pedant.
The founding and growth of cities anchored by markets and trade echoes a broader transformation from 1000 CE to the European Renaissance and Industrial Revolution of societies responding to market pressures rather than command economies, first evident in China and then later in Europe. The era of Chinese predominance from 1000 to about 1500 coincides with the bureaucratization and professionalization of the state in both the civil and military realms. In Europe, Venice was an excellent example of a maritime power center, the capital of its own Republic, earning enough surplus through trade to pay for calories, men, and metal to defend itself. It is however dependent on agricultural surplus elsewhere; this surplus enables concentration of economic activity, which leads to specialization and therefore innovation, in market economies.
In fact, the swing back toward command and state regulation begins in Italy (specifically Venice and Milan) in the 1300s through the hiring of military companies, paid in coin earned by trade, and a civil-service state apparatus to inspect and certify these fighting bodies for contract compliance. In fact one can argue that a bureaucratic, professional state capacity first developed for the “management and export of organized violence,” contrasting feudal or absolutist power based on a core military strength of heavy armored cavalry (itself an innovation impelled westward from the Eurasian steppe), and then propagated to other realms of state power.
In the Americas, gigantic, populous native societies collapsed after European contact, propelled initially by lack of immunity to novel infectious diseases but reaching a tipping point after disease weakened these societies such that state could no longer furnish the resources necessary to exert power, e.g. for infrastructure upkeep, but also to resist invasion, displacement, and internal rebellion. As Europeans arrived in force they settled in a geography they found to be empty of civilization, with only the barest hints of how native societies shaped and manipulated that land (although we see some notable exceptions: Broadway traces its lineage to the Lenape Wickquasgeck Trail, named after a tribe which resided in what is now Westchester County, visible on a 1656 Dutch map of Greater New York. This means that the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, A, N, Q, R, and W trains all have, in part, a Lenape ancestry.)
In North America, and New England in particular, prior to the Industrial Revolution, most settlements of note were coastal or riverine ports and many originated as trading ports or factories for the India Companies or royal charters, and the high ratio of land to labor kept surplus low and infrastructure scant. In the US before 1815 the cost of transporting a ton of goods 30 miles inland equaled the cost of shipping a ton of goods across the Atlantic. All this changed after 1815 with the construction first of canals and all-weather macadam roads, and later railways, in what historians call a transportation revolution, often by the market economy but also with taxation or state grants in kind for land or delegation of authority. The absence of absolutist power to appropriate surplus, which includes the absence of monarchy, universal (free) male suffrage, and low levels of taxation) and the land/labor ratio driving innovation to increase yield per man-hour in both extraction and manufacturing drove American cities to grow and flourish, attract immigration from Europe’s teeming shores, speed the highest rate of urbanization in history, and furnish the public education of all citizens. Only in the South did these metrics lag, with interior economies still based on extraction powered by chattel slavery.
SOAPBOX
And it all came to a crushing, grinding halt when some assholes decided the administrative state was the enemy and convinced a slim minority of brainrotted American voters to empower snake oil salesmen and charlatans to be in charge.
Fun stuff.
Some sources:
Howe, D. W. What Hath God Wrought
McPherson, J. Battle Cry of Freedom
McNeill, W. The Pursuit of Power and Plagues and Peoples
Mann, C. 1491: New Revelations of The Americas Before Columbus
Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Museum
New-York Historical Society
FYI: Guns, Germs and Steel is pretty popular on the internets, but its geographic determinism ignores many salient facts. In fact, one can make the case that two-thirds of the book could simply be dropped, with the remainder retitled “Germs,” but even then, the jury’s out on his conclusions.
The article you linked to says the northernmost city on the Fall Line is New Brunswick New Jersey. The same thing happens all over it’s just that the ones in New England aren’t the edge of the alluvial plain below the Appalachians. The ones in Canada aren’t on the alluvial plain below the Appalachians either.
There’s nothing to portage around until you get to Troy. Which is how the explorer Hudson got alllll the way up there. Where there used to be something but they went and built a series of dams to allow passage to the Erie Canal or the Champlain Canal. Over 200 years ago. You could and can take a canal boat all the way to Buffalo. Or Quebec. I’m not in the mood to look up the iterations that means nowadays you can get all the way to the St. Lawrence. …. next high tide at Troy will be at 6:30 local time.
Believe everything on Wikipedia they are establishing a trading post at what has become Albany almost simultaneously as New Amsterdam. Supposedly because that’s where you enter the Hudson River after exiting the Mohawk River in what is now Schenectady. Because it’s below the falls in Troy and the ginormous ones along the Mohawk in Cohoes.
“Believe everything on Wikipedia they are establishing a trading post at what has become Albany almost simultaneously as New Amsterdam.”
Well, there is pretty firm historical evidence that Fort Orange was founded at Albany in 1624, while Fort Amsterdam was begun on Manhattan in 1625, so . . . yes, a trading post being established at Albany almost simultaneously as New Amsterdam is completely accurate?
Hudson was aiming to find places to make money. Apparently the trading expeditions made enough that the V.O.C. decided to spend the money to establish a fort in the vicinity of Albany at the same time they are settling the southern tip of Manhattan. I’m sure the bookkeepers kept books. Even if the ledgers no longer exist, minutes from the meeting where the board decided to establish new forts does. Or sumptin. I don’t care enough to ferret out details.
It doesn’t change that the falls on the Hudson are submerged in the pond north of Federal Dam at Troy. Where the next high tide will be at 18:37. 153 miles north of The Battery. Or that The Battery and Troy aren’t on The Fall Line. Because they aren’t on the alluvial plain. Likely has something to do with glaciers and the Palisades and the similar ridges west of them. I don’t care enough to ferret out details.
Other places have a fall line.. it’s where the falls are…. there aren’t any around Manhattan.
I tend to be a believer in the “Prisoner of Geography” school (major features of the land that affect transportation, cultivation, mining, etc. are the driving factor in numerous infrastructure and economic results, if not even major socio/cultural ones) but even if you don’t go that far, the idea that city origin comes solely from religious/political extraction seems like bunk. And not just more recently but even during ancient times.
First off, the deepest origin of cities appears to have a security function or a simple secondary industry economic function relating to storage of grain, well before any evidence of more organized religious or political extraction. This is true whether looking at the earliest cities in the Levant or the Pueblo culture in the American Southwest thousands of years later.
Second is that even in very ancient times cities were more numerous than the capitals of kingdoms, even when polities were smaller and more numerous, and even when there were cities with a clear politico-religious purpose and origin. Egypt was more than just Memphis and Luxor (although few people can name Herakleopolis, Abydos, Tanis or Sais) and the rotating preeminence of Ur/Akkad/Babylon did not mean that places like Nineveh, Uruk, Kish, etc. did not exist throughout Mesopotamia.
By comparison, as Alon notes, examples abound of cities founded for economic or trade reasons absent some royal capital reason. London and the Thames crossings in relation to Roman routes to Dover is a classic case, but even quintessentially royal Paris seems to owe its existence to the geographic factor of Ile de Cite (although there is dispute whether the original outpost of the Parisii tribe was actually on the island or if the island just made it easy to cross/bridge the river and charge tolls of trade across it). And once again, below the top level cities you have lots of examples of places like Innsbruck being a places to cross the bridge over the river Inn on the way to the passes of the Alps, or Salzburg being a place where you could either get the tools and knowledge to work surrounding salt mines or bring the salt you dug and sell it.
Indeed these points attack more broadly with the ideas that cities/towns are founded by some kind of Big Man choosing to centralize resources there. It seems almost axiomatic that cities are not a result of planned extraction of wealth (“come be here so I can use you and your surplus for my ends”) but instead are generators of wealth due to the beneficial effects of aggregation and specialization (“because I started making salt mining tools for my friend, it will be easy for other people to buy my tools and mine local salt as well, and with my friend and these other people all bringing salt to market someone can profitably run barges of it down the river to other places, which means more salt can be sold at a higher price than if the salt were only being consumed locally”).
If you were to look for examples of rulers extracting wealth you would not look to cities but exactly the opposite to very rural areas. Throughout history there have been examples of marginal areas being promoted and developed beyond their inherent carrying capacity or local economy because of some primary industry extraction that is beneficial to major players elsewhere (at times parts of the Silk Road west of Chang’an, some fishing communities, many places throughout history that were the “the mines”/West Virginia, etc.) But cities are both generators and consumers of internal wealth, not some place where wealth is pulled from and sent elsewhere to lesser local benefit.
There are of course some examples of cities founded simply based on the desire of major leaders (Byzantium), or whose importance, even economic importance, grew out of political factors (Vienna). But as the primary cause of cities I don’t see it.
Just this month scientists have revealed results of new archeological finds from excavations under Hotel Dieu on Ile de a Cité that is being claimed as definitive: this was the original settlement of the Parisii’s. Not Nanterre.
In France logically one might have expected Marseilles to have retained its predominance since Roman days due to its location and port. Even Lyon seems more logical than Paris, due to it being the convergence of Northern Europe, the transAlpine trade routes and routes to the Mediterranean; and of course being a defensible presque-ile between the Rhone and Saone, which like Paris Ile de la Cité was probably the original reason for the ancient settlement. Though it is navigable today from the Mediterranean I doubt it would have been prior to the steam age because of strong currents. (A difference with the Hudson is that it was navigable all the way to Albany + Troy and shows tidal flow over most of that–it is less a river than a very long estuary.) Paris would have been a more difficult trade route due to being far inland (though navigable) and the connection to the Mediterranean involved traversing the watershed (Seine/Saone). In the 18th/19th century it still involved traversing 189 locks via the Burgundy Canal and today’s best route still involves 114 locks (Canal de la Marne à la Saône). Hard, slow work even if the ‘sailing’ was easy.
I wish I had access to my copy of Marc Bloch’s Ile de France which would be filled with informative stuff on this topic. What I do remember is that he says the name means the island of France, not an island in France, ie. it is the origin of conception of France as a nation. It spread from there, and obviously it was this political notion that meant it had to be the capital of France. All those 3 cities had defining geographical reasons for their founding but it was politics that made Paris the capital. France was Europe’s first defined nation and that originated and was dictated from Paris.
There is to some degree a game of telephone being played here. I think the point that Bret Devereaux was trying to make (in part) is that geography isn’t totally determinative of city formation, the way it’s sometimes taken, which is really the heart of the matter.
If you look at a map of the US, you can pretty easily convince yourself that geography is going to be the dominant factor in major city development, as most major cities in the US develop out of clear geographical concerns. But compare that to the major European cities, and fewer of the European cities follow the claimed rules than the US cities.
And even if you look in the US, the pattern does break down in many cases. Atlanta is the major city of the US southeast, and its geographical location has nothing to recommend it; it’s not even on a river, let alone a notable river. (Wikipedia suggests the site was chosen fairly arbitrarily to be a railroad wye junction). Geography would suggest that Savannah or Charleston (coastal ports with good harbors) or Augusta or Macon or Columbia (fall line cities) would become the major metro, but no, it’s Atlanta.
In general, I think geography is a useful factor for predicting which sites could become cities, but there are other, sometimes more important, factors for determining which ones actually develop into major cities. Looking at the US and Canada tends to bias you towards thinking of geographical factors, because the European settlement was focused more heavily on developing and maintaining trade with Europe, so the factors tend to align on geographical determinism.
Atlanta was chosen because it wasn’t difficult to put a railroad junction there. Many other cities would qualify, but someone decided Atlanta. You don’t have to move very much farther west to hit mountains where are difficult enough that the city wouldn’t have been chosen for a railroad junction.
Railroads are valuable to a city for the same reason rivers and oceans are – they are useful transportation. That the railroad junction is in Atlanta is a geographical feature. A canal junction could be built and create a city. These days highways also create cities – but since they mostly go existing city to existing city you don’t see the effect.
Transportation is a requirement for a city – you need to get enough food in to support people living there. If the religion puts a major temple someplace the believers will go there, and that will create the demand to get some transport. The easier transport is, the more likely the city is to grow. If you can just enough enough food for the priest but not anybody else then it will remain a temple without a city since anyone else attempting to live there will starve (the pilgrims presumably will eat all their food and then fast until they get back to someplace where there is food – this can be made part of the religions tenets)
Up to some city size you can get by with just dirt tracks. However water ports can handle a lot more cargo and so historical they were common places to put a city.
”If you look at a map of the US, you can pretty easily convince yourself that geography is going to be the dominant factor in major city development, as most major cities in the US develop out of clear geographical concerns. But compare that to the major European cities, and fewer of the European cities follow the claimed rules than the US cities.”
I think it is just the opposite to the point I am surprised you could even make this argument. The United States is somewhat littered with cities and major cities that are rather arbitrarily placed or do not follow classic geographical rules for city location. Indianapolis was basically just put at the center of Indiana and Oklahoma City similar; Atlanta has been mentioned, and Cheyanne also exists for a railroad crossing; Dallas/Fort Worth, Phoenix, Las Vegas; even Los Angeles is only the West Coast’s fourth best harbor, if that.
In Europe by contrast, the geographic ties to city locations are so deep they are often written right into the city’s name. Oxford is where you can ford the river Ox and Frankfurt am Main where you can ford (“furt” in German) the river Main. Plymouth is at the mouth of the river Plym, Bremerhaven and Copenhagen are both harbors (“havens” from the sea), Rotterdam and Amsterdam are places where geography allowed a dam across the Rotte and Amstel rivers.
Even cities in Europe where it isn’t this obvious from the name still have a clear geographic connection. Brussels was founded on an island on the river Senne as Paris was around Ile de Cite (the island in Brussels no longer exists), Strasbourg is on the Rhine basically directly across from the narrowest point of the Vosges mountains at the Col de Severne pass, Volograd is at the narrowest point between the Volga and Don rivers, etc.
I don’t know the history of every city in Europe, I’m sure there are some planned towns/arbitrary placements, but overall Europe is the one following geographic conventions, not the US.
Note, as henrymiller74 pointed out, if you look at a railroad line as a type of geography facilitation transportation the way a river, harbor or mountain pass does, then some “arbitrary” US cities like Atlanta/Cheyanne make sense again.
According to Wikipedia they picked it to be the headquarters for the Union Pacific’s Mountain Division. It’s halfway-ish between Omaha Nebraska and Odgen Utah. A geographic tidbit. I’d speculate it’s because it’s flatish and has water. Yet more geographic tidbits. Halfway-ish is a good place because those pesky pesky crew members want to sleep.
…. the alternative to a train between Omaha and Sacramento is sailing around South America. South America is a geographic tidbit too.
… Denver was deeply disappointed that the … the geography… to route it through Denver was bad. So they incorporated a railroad to go all the way up the desolate windswept newly incorporated town of Cheyenne, Dakota Territory. It didn’t reach there until after trains were flitting between Omaha Nebraska and Odgen Utah. And I don’t care if the trains from Denver went to Cheyenne’s Union Pacific Depot or a separate one or loitered on tracks somewhere. Denver to the Trancontinental Line is geography.
Umm, umm, um, to determine where the center of the state is you have to examine it’s geography. Which makes sense if the state is almost as flat as any other Great Plains state.
Congress was .. generous.. in allocating the land and the freshly minted Indianans decided to put it on the east side of West Fork of the White River. The river is a geographic feature in the flatness.
”Umm, umm, um, to determine where the center of the state is you have to examine it’s geography.”
Determining the center is examining geometry, not geography. Geography says you should put a city on one side or another of a pass, for instance, so that people going over that pass anyway can stop at your city too. Picking the exact center of a plot of land is the opposite of geographic thinking.
”the freshly minted Indianans decided to put it on the east side of West Fork of the White River.”
I think the figure is that the circle at the center of Indy is 2 mi from the exact center of the state. They didn’t pick the West Fork of the White River because of any inherent geographic significance. The state has dozens of equally inconsequential forks and branches of minor rivers. St Louis being just downstream of the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri (two of the three longest rivers on the continent) so boats heading to or from either can stop in St Louis is river geography determining city location. Once again, picking the center of an arbitrarily bounded plot of land then looking for the nearest river a couple miles away is the opposite.
But they didn’t relentlessly put it at the exact center. If they weren’t considering the river what were they considering? Because otherwise it’s flat, flat, flat or flat.
Congress decided the “center of the state”. Sections are miles wide. They didn’t put it precisely in the center. They put it on the banks of the river flowing through the sections Congress decided should be the capital. Very rational decision when the whole state is flat, flat, flat and mostly flat.
Unfortunately the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi aren’t in Indiana, they had to work with what they had. because it’s really reallly flat. Or as WIkipedia says
If they weren’t considering the river what were they considering? The couldn’t drive their Tesla along I-70 to get there from Washington D.C. Or their Model-T along the National Road. They couldn’t use the Baltimore and Ohio either because they are laying out the town years before the Liverpool and Manchester or the B&O are running trains. They did have a brief flirtation with canal mania but railroads happened. Wikipedia says they had the first Union Station. Which implies more than one railroad. I grow weary of considering early 19th Century decisions. Although I would like to point out that it is still reallly realllllllllllly really flat between the Appalachians and the Rockies. …. Indianapolis is not on one of the Great Lakes. It’s so flat between Chicago and Niagara Falls that there are no locks. …..reallly realllllllllllly really flat.
Oxford is where you could cross the Thames with oxen, nearby Swin(e)ford is where you could cross the Thames with pigs.
Hey, that explains Schweinfurt!
And the porcine and bovine who, like BoJo, Cameron, Jezza Clarkson, assorted Murdoch henchmen et al., congregate a bit further north at Chipping Norton.
I’m not sure what you think extraction is in this context. Security and grain storage is extraction. Extraction is the appropriation of surplus to provide for full-time rulers, artisans, clergy, and warriors. From the beginning of recorded history to the Industrial Revolution, the overwhelming majority of sedentary populations were subsistence farmers, creating and consuming nearly all of what they produced. The four (most of the time, three, as rulers and warriors usually overlapped) other classes were tiny, because that’s all the surplus could support.
Not a statistically significant thing from antiquity to gunpowder.
About the closest this comes to the truth is sedentary empires paying nomadic border pastoralists to keep other nomadic border pastoralists out, as occurred with the Han and Xiongnu/Xianbei, or Qi and Northern Wei, or Song and Jin/Western Xia/Liao. Which carried its own risks as the steppe nomads would often join forces with who they were being paid to fight and raid the interior; or the nomads migrated south, settled, sinicized and became part of the empire.
This occurs in the present day because of political structures which advantage rural areas in a tragic and unfair misappropriation of resources, like Wyoming getting two senators instead of being run as an internal resource colony by a GS-14 at Fish & Wildlife, as God intended.
I think most of that is true. On the other hand, very soon after you start making fortified cities (as protection against raids by the neighboring tribe(s)), the (future) citizenry and/or the (future) king start using their position inside the fortification to extract wealth from the (future) peasantry, i.e. the people who live outside the city. (Hey, you built this fort to store your grain in. If I only give you back 90% of it, you will grumble but still store it here, because a guaranteed 90% is better than risking that the enemy loots it from your unfortified village granary. Or what are you gonna do, attack the fort you just finished building?)
And only a short while after that, eocrats figure out that now that there are numerous fortified cities that extract wealth from the peasantry, a structurally new purpose to fight wars for has come to be: it is now possible to conquer the neighboring city, behead its government (both figuratively and literally), install some hopefully-loyal governor with a garrison, and keep that city extracting from the local peasantry, but passing on a decent share of that to the capital, ad maiorem urbis gloriam. (Or you can use the threat thereof to make them pay tribute.)
Generally speaking, before a region gets converted into states (with monopoly of violence), trade will be low-volume, high-margin aristocratic gift-exchange, since the aristocrats are the most convenient source of armed protection to escort the trade mission. You can partially deter neighboring aristocrat Bob and his friends/henchmen based on your ability to recognize and punish them, but you really need at all times enough force to protect against the plausible level of threat from a peasant gang too anonymous to punish. (Alternatively, colonial traders from a region with states can pack enough heat to e.g. do ports-and-forts. Obviously this is irrelevant for the question of primary state formation.)
….so you are arguing that before a region has aristocrats the only trade is for goods the aristocrats want. Okayyyyy…
No, aristocrats come into existence first, and they might eventually create states and peace. (I recommend this series from Bret Devereaux about the period between the two.) As risk declines, it becomes profitable to trade in lower value density goods. Which is not exactly the same thing as “of interest to commoners” (for an extreme example, Stone Age people traded obsidian as a tool material, because each person only used a minuscule quantity), but correlates very well. Which is why most examples of early trade, from amber through ivory and precious metals to pearls are obviously luxury goods.
Incidentally, my understanding is that in the places so fertile they could be sedentary without agriculture, people have started forming a kind of aristocracy before agriculture. Likewise pastoralists, even full nomads. (“Social complexity”, a.k.a. labor specialization, including “specializing into decisionmaking”, which is a bloodless way to say “bossing other people around”.)
On the other hand, perhaps I need to clarify that the relationship between aristocrats and peasants was often good enough that the peasantry was armed and fought on behalf of the aristocracy. So we shouldn’t ignore that even though we speak of extraction and use descriptions that make it sound adversarial (as I did upthread), in reality in most societies the peasantry must have considered the aristocracy legitimate.
I prefer my science fiction to be set in the future. Though aliens using tractor beams to build pyramids can be entertaining. I then find myself speculating why beings with interstellar travel and tractor beams would need a pyramid. ( Or Stonehenge or any other astronomical observatory ) And then wondering why they would need two.
As Onux pointed out … transporting…. pretty stuff… has been happening for a very long time. Ordinary people can have pretty stuff. Everybody was ordinary people for a very long time too. The pretty stuff came before there was agriculture. And it’s not unique to modern humans either.
…. it’s not unique to mammals. If certain corvids decide you …. are a resource… they will bring you …. eye catching … things.
“Generally speaking, before a region gets converted into states (with monopoly of violence), trade will be low-volume, high-margin aristocratic gift-exchange,”
I don’t think this is true either. Trade predates any sort of known human political organization, indeed trade likely predates humans. There is firm evidence of trade dating from ~300,000 years ago in the Olorgesailie Basin in the from of obsidian and ochre which are only found outside of the basin – this is right on the boundary between Homo Heidelbergensis and Homo Sapiens. Trade in ochre among Australian Aboriginal people was continental, a particular mine is known to have been worked for tens of thousands of years and evidence exists of its ochre being found 1,000km away. Otzi the Iceman was found in the Alps with an axe whose copper had come from hundreds of km away from a mine in Italy. Seashells, ochre, flint, amber, obsidian, soapstone, ivory, and manganese are all things known to have been traded before any sort of farming developed, let alone permanent settlements or states or aristocrats.
It is true. Quoting Ch1 of Pursuit of Power:
“Early civilizations existed by virtue of transfer of food from its producers to rulers and men of power who supported themselves, along with a following of military and artisan specialists, on the food so secured. Sometimes, too, the labor power of the food-producing majority was conscripted for some sort of public works: digging a canal, fortifying a city, or erecting a temple. This basic transfer of resources from the many to a few was supplemented by a circulation of luxury goods among members of the ruling elites-partly gift-giving from the great to followers and subordinates, partly tribute from subordinates to the great. Trade across political frontiers was really a variation within this larger pattern of exchanges among men of power. It differed from such exchanges in being more easily interrupted, and less strongly colored by patterns of deference and condescension of the kind that prevailed within the ruling elites of civilized states.”
Perhaps interpret “converted into states” as “developed into more centralized polities akin to Westphalian states rather than primitive cities run as family or tribal concerns.” And many Native American tribes and Far Eastern nomadic pastoralists would be surprised at your assumption that farming, permanent settlements, and states are required to be called civilizations. Hitting “just one more turn” a little too much, maybe?
That was also a good deal from the people, at least in general. Your aristocrats had incentive to ensure you had enough food, so taxes had to be limited (some did better than others) – remember the contrast is to an invading army that would raid for your food then kill you (so their kids could get your land). Of course in some cases it was worse than others, but the alternative is important to keep in mind before you go calling this a bad deal. Without someone trained in war that you support you get an even worse deal.
You have been watching too much TV. I don’t know how the far Eastern’s lived. However the native American’s were not nearly as nomaic as TV makes them out. However this is something very hard to figure out because the Native Americans most Europeans (people who could write) encountered really were that way. However you have too remember that they came with guns, horses, and small pox which all spread much faster than the Europeans themselves. This allowed and caused vast cultural changes which results in the Natives you can read about in verifiable history being very different from the reality of most of their existence. There is ample evidence that very few (if any) were nomads. They may have had summer and winter houses, and moved the village from time to time, but the territory was generally fairly well defined and they were not nomads.
There is archeological evidence for some tribes controlling large areas. There is archeological evidence for villages with walls – indicating there were afraid of something (who we cannot know). There is evidence of war. …
Now all of the above looks very different from how Europe developed and so most people come with preconceptions as to what civilization should look like and Native America did not look like that. However Native America also doesn’t look like nomads.
I guess you need a lesson in both grammar and history. I didn’t say all Native Americans were nomads. I said:
1) many (not all) Native American tribes (one phrase) and
2) Far Eastern nomadic pastoralists (another, unique phrase, referring to pre-sinicized nomadic peoples like the Xiongnu or Rourans or, later, Mongols, and not Native American. In fact, I’ll broaden the scope now and also include the confederations which tended to migrate to the west such as the Sarmatians or Huns)
would be surprised at the assertion that
3) farming (many Native American tribes were hunter-gatherers, and almost all Far Eastern nomadic pastoralists lived on the grassy steppe, which provided the forage for their animals),
4) permanent settlements (many Native American villages moved from time to time, being lightly built of locally gathered timber and animal skins and furs, an assertion you echo and yet contest)
5) and states (many Native American tribes were made up of bands formed of kinship ties, between which there was mobility, and many tribes existed in loose political confederations like the Haudenosaunee League, but nothing close to Westphalian sovereignty)
were required for civilization.
To argue the inverse is to argue Eastern nomadic pastoralists and Native Americans were not civilized. I argue they were, and these prerequisites are ethnocentric. Hopefully you’re on board with this latter assertion.
Indeed, four of the other enthnocentric prerequisites for Western civilization, writing, the wheel, money, and markets, were mostly absent from the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu), excepting some parts on the frontiers. The empire was managed through un-transcribed Quechua and a system of knotted fiber cords called quipu, and the economy was based on barter, gifts, and corvée labor.
I get my information from the sources listed in another comment on this post, which I’m not going to repeat here. (Not TV.)
Istanbul didn’t amount to much until it became imperial capital because it’s not really a good location for a city without significant investment due to the lack of water supply as it’s surrounded by salt water on three sides and it doesn’t rain much.
It’s only when they had government money to bring the water in by aqueduct that that it could thrive.
There’s an awful lot of places where the train station is further out from the centre than Karlsruhe, it really depends how much modern growth there has been.