This chapter reviews the literature on the origins of cities and states. We argue that purely agricultural societies are unlikely to have cities because population dispersal reduces travel costs for farmers and herders. But incentives for agglomeration could arise from the productivity of urban manufacturing, the need for collective defense, or cultural factors. We supplement our study of Mesopotamia with archaeological data on state formation in Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. All of these cases had highly productive food technologies, pre-existing stratification, and close links with urbanization. Based on our models in Chapters 6, 8, and 10, we suggest three pathways to a state. In the “property rights hypothesis,” improving food technology and long-run population growth lead to the creation of elite property rights over the best sites, a shrinking commons, and falling commoner wages. This eventually triggers urban manufacturing and city-state formation. In the “elite warfare hypothesis,” warfare among elites over land rents causes defensive agglomeration in cities and territorial expansion by successful elites. In the “environmental shift hypothesis,” commoner populations migrate toward refuge sites (often river valleys) controlled by local elites, again leading to falling commoner wages, urbanization, and state formation.

Chapter 7 examines what causes pandemics – and how to avoid the next one.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

An intense debate has arisen among scholars concerning the financial sustainability of the grain funds that Greek and Roman cities used to cope with the instabilities of the grain market. In this paper, we apply a Monte Carlo simulation to model their financial dynamics. Due to the uncertainties pertaining to the scope of such funds (targeting urban dwellers only or including rural residents), our model takes into account two scenarios: ‘optimistic’ (urban only) and ‘pessimistic’ (both urban and rural). The analysis reaches several important findings: (1) For both scenarios, we witness a considerable rate of funds collapsing in their first 10 years of operation. After 10 years, however, the probability of failure displays very little change, as if there was a threshold over which the funds had accumulated enough capital to withstand shortages. (2) As expected, the survival rates are significantly higher for the optimistic scenario. (3) The withdrawals seem to have the most dramatic impact on the dynamic of the fund. Overall, while the grain funds do not appear to be sustainable in the urban-rural scenario, they show clear signs of sustainability in the urban-only scenario. The results invite reconsideration of the widespread view that grain funds were an inefficient and precarious response to food crisis.

This chapter focuses on struggles to dwell in the city that characterised a strand of both racist practice and responses to it. From attempts to purchase collectively housing to the rarely told stories of organised squatting and the emergence of the black housing movement, the forces of racist exclusion produced a Newtonian response; collective endeavours to claim the right to find somewhere to live in the cities of post-war Britain. These social movements racialised both the claim to dwell in the city and the challenges to patterns of discrimination. But the struggles which emerged from the grassroots and grew over the 1970s and 1980s also in some ways ran their course over time for reasons that are also considered in this chapter.

This chapter compares the ways that two similarly sized cities, Chicago and Amsterdam, have chosen to govern their streets. Chicago sold a seventy-five-year concession to manage street parking to a consortium of private investors, whereas Amsterdam’s government maintains the ability to directly govern its streets. In turn, Chicago is an illustration of how privatization of a common good according to money-lending logics, far from allowing for flexibility and efficient governance, completely prevents a city from changing with the times. Chicago has lost control over its own streets and can no longer decide what their best use is without paying an extortionate price. Any governing of a shared communal space that has a broader concern than generating profit for a private corporation is here effectively undermined by allowing marketized parking. For the purposes of this book, the Chicago/Amsterdam comparison illustrates the limitations of using privatized business actors to efficiently govern shared city space. It also serves as a counterexample to the neoliberal dogma that government should abstain from planning, because their attempts at doing so cannot outperform the market.

The economy of many parts of Europe changed significantly during the period from 1450 to 1600. The vast majority of Europeans continued to live in villages and make their living by agriculture, but new, larger-scale processes of trade and production shaped both the cities and the countryside, altering the landscape and leading to environmental problems. Population growth and the worsening climate of the Little Ice Age contributed to food shortages, rising prices of basic commodities, and a growing polarization of wealth. In western Europe landless people often migrated in search of employment, while in eastern Europe noble landowners reintroduced serfdom, tying peasants to the land. Rural areas in both western and eastern Europe became more specialized in what they produced, and in cities wealth increasingly came from trade. Investment in equipment and machinery to process certain types of products, such as metals and cloth, increased significantly, with coal replacing increasingly scarce wood in some areas as a source of heat and power. Successful capitalist merchant-entrepreneurs made vast fortunes in banking and moneylending, while the poor supported themselves any way they could.

This chapter presents a snapshot of all of Europe in 1450, when the climate was colder and wetter than it had been several centuries earlier, which led to poor harvests and recurring famine. Most people lived in small villages in households organized around a marital couple, and never traveled very far. Cities were growing in many parts of Europe, however, with some urban dwellers becoming wealthy and powerful, though the nobility remained the dominant group. In some areas nation-states were slowly coalescing, and everywhere warfare was common, with gunpowder weapons becoming increasingly important. The invention of the printing press with movable metal type spurred the expansion of literacy in vernacular languages, though advanced education was in Latin, and limited to men. The Christian Church in central and western Europe was a wealthy, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution headed by the pope. Most people living in Europe were Christian, and engaged in a variety of religious rituals throughout the year and across their lifespans, as did Jews and Muslims. Production of most commodities was organized through guilds, but cloth-making and mining were increasingly organized along capitalist lines, with an investor providing money for tools, and workers paid for their labor.

This chapter presents an array of institutions at many levels: international, regional, and national and municipal levels. The survey of mechanisms identifies the key features of each system, noting the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. Landmark decisions illustrate facets of the systems. The overview concludes with two famous success stories of enforcement in civil litigation, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala (US) and In Re Pinochet (UK).

Chapter 20 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of the early Cold War years and the threshold of the Urban Planet’s Greatest Acceleration. It visits imperial capitals like London and Paris as certain types of spaces there became “proto-Third worlds” where young nationalist leaders formed their early ideas of liberation and development, then brought them back to colonial cities to launch struggles for national independence. Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha or non-violent resistance transformed the practice of mass urban protest even as Gandhi fought global urban industrialism, rising sectarian violence, and the British Raj en route to Indian independence. Mao Zedong took a contrasting route to power that also started with villages, in this case as effective military bases to expel far better-armed imperial and bourgeois nationalist forces and then seize China’s great cities. Dozens of other independence movements adopted mixtures of these two strategies, which coalesced above all around development – starting with state or capitalist investment in advanced industrial facilities as well as the housing, educational, health, transport, and planning infrastructure aimed to erase the sheer inequalities of the imperial-era Urban Planet.