Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Writing the city under crisis’
- 2 Pristine cities
- 3 Greece and Rome
- 4 Cities of the Feudal mode of production in Europe
- 5 Asian cities: Asiatic and Feudal modes of production
- 6 From colonial to Third World cities
- 7 The transformation of the city: from the Feudal to the Capitalist mode of production and on to the apocalypse
- Notes
- References
- Index
6 - From colonial to Third World cities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Writing the city under crisis’
- 2 Pristine cities
- 3 Greece and Rome
- 4 Cities of the Feudal mode of production in Europe
- 5 Asian cities: Asiatic and Feudal modes of production
- 6 From colonial to Third World cities
- 7 The transformation of the city: from the Feudal to the Capitalist mode of production and on to the apocalypse
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Chapter 6 traces the cities engendered by the global expansion of Europe as the collecting agencies for the accumulation of capital which powered the Capitalist mode of production and the industrial revolution. Out of this process came not only the cities of the Americas, which won their independence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and those who did so in the mid-twentieth century, but also the cities of the White dominions whose privileges enabled them to break out of poverty into self-sustaining growth.
IBERIAN COLONIZATION
The founding of cities by the Portuguese and Spanish
The expansion of Europe and beginning of its monopoly position over the rest of the world was dramatically signalled by the voyages, conquests and settlements of the Portuguese and Spanish. Retaking Portugal from the Muslims led on logically to attacking them in Africa, taking Ceuta in 1415. Within a century, stupendous voyages carried Portuguese power round the coast of Africa to Brazil, India, Indonesia and China. The Azores and Madeira started sugar export to Europe, El Mina exported African gold, the Kongo kingdom became the source of slaves, Kilwa dominated the East African coast, Calicut produced calico, Molucca opened the Spice Islands, Hormuz, Goa, Malacca, Canton and Ningpo siphoned all the trade of the east. Soon Macau was secured, and Japan's trade through Nagasaki. So Portugal founded Europe's global urban trading network, extended by Spain through most of the Americas. Dutch, French and British soon picked up the relentless penetration and construction of the fiercely contested network of world trade and embryo cities, without whose products and profits the industrial revolution would not have occurred.
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- Information
- The City in Time and Space , pp. 252 - 305Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998