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Tracing the evolution of the state from its beginnings to the early Middle Ages, this comprehensive handbook focuses on key institutions and dynamics while providing accessible accounts of states and empires in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean basin was a multicultural region with a great diversity of linguistic, religious, social and ethnic groups. This dynamic social and cultural landscape encouraged extensive contact and exchange among different communities. This book seeks to explain what happened when different ethnic, social, linguistic and religious groups, among others, came into contact with each other, especially in multiethnic commercial settlements located throughout the region. What means did they employ to mediate their interactions? How did each group construct distinct identities while interacting with others? What new identities came into existence because of these contacts? Professor Demetriou brings together several strands of scholarship that have emerged recently, especially ethnic, religious and Mediterranean studies. She reveals new aspects of identity construction in the region, examining the Mediterranean as a whole, and focuses not only on ethnic identity but also on other types of collective identities, such as civic, linguistic, religious and social.
From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centres for defence and warfare. They show how in these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new rituals and ceremonies connected leaders with citizens and the gods, new identities as citizens were created, and new forms of power and sovereignty emerged. They also examine how this unprecedented concentration of people led to disease, violence, slavery and subjugations of unprecedented kinds and scales.
'Peter J. Taylor has produced a sweeping, empirically grounded, defense of cities as fundamental building blocks of long-term, large scale social structures; a way of freeing social science from state-centric bias; and indeed, mankind's hope. However, the single greatest strength of this complex, seductive, argument is the insistence on treating cities relationally, as process. Here the key to understanding the significance of cities is by studying them in terms of the dynamic networks they form and in their relations to states.' – Richard E. Lee, Binghamton University, US 'The founding father of the famous Globalization and World Cities research network and think-tank on worldwide links between cities presents this fascinating overview on cities in geohistory. By moving cities to the centre stage, Peter Taylor proposes that concern for states tell only part of the macro-social story of humanity. Cities have been, and are, the engines of innovation. This impressive new book provides new insights into why cities succeed or fail. The book is in the class with broadminded presentations like Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.' – Christian Matthiessen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and President, International Geographical Union's Commission on Urban Geography 'This is a "big" book by Peter Taylor. It tells of the extraordinary world-making powers of cities across the ages, it explains why a state-centric social science has constrained recognition of these powers over the last two centuries, and it outlines a new "indisciplinarity" to help us make sense of a human condition increasingly forged out of the urban. Anyone troubled by the social sciences as we know them, ought to read this book.' – Ash Amin, Cambridge University, UK and author, Land of Strangers Accepting that cities are extraordinary, this book provides an original city-centred narrative of human creativity, past, present and future. In this innovative, ambitious and wide-ranging book, Peter Taylor demonstrates that cities are the epicenters of human advancement. In exploring cities as sites through which economies flourish, by harnessing the creative potential of myriad communication networks, the author considers cities from varying temporal and spatial perspectives. Four stories of cities are told: the origins of city networks; the domination of cities by world-empires; the genesis of a singular modern creative interval in which innovation culminates in today's globalised cities; and finally, the need for cities to act as centres for human creativity to produce a more resilient global society in the current crisis century. Providing a long-term view through which to consider the role of cities in attending to incipient crises of the twenty-first century, this closely argued thesis will prove essential for students and scholars of urban studies, geography and sociology, and all with a professional interest in, or personal fascination for, cities.
No detailed comparison of the city-state in medieval Europe has been undertaken over the last century. Research has concentrated on the role of city-states and their republican polities as harbingers of the modern state, or else on their artistic and cultural achievements, above all in Italy. Much less attention has been devoted to the cities' territorial expansion: why, how, and with what consequences cities in the urban belt, stretching from central and northern Italy over the Alps to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries, succeeded (or failed) in constructing sovereign polities, with or without dependent territories. Tom Scott goes beyond the customary focus on the leading Italian city-states to include, for the first time, detailed coverage of the Swiss city-states and the imperial cities of Germany. He criticizes current typologies of the city-state in Europe advanced by political and social scientists to suggest that the city-state was not a spent force in early modern Europe, but rather survived by transformation and adaption. He puts forward instead a typology which embraces both time and space by arguing for a regional framework for analysis which does not treat city-states in isolation, but within a wider geopolitical setting.
The most comprehensive account yet of the human past from prehistory to the present.
This book presents the city beneath the surface of Abu Salabikh, southern Iraq. The archaeology and the textual data combine to reveal its architecture, agricultural and industrial enterprises, and social structure. Integrated with our wider knowledge of south Mesopotamia at this time it creates a vivid image of city life in 2600 BC.
Altera Roma explores the confrontation of two cultures, European and Amerindian, and two empires, Spanish and Aztec. In an age of exploration and conquest, Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and merchants brought an array of cultural preconceptions. Their encounter with Aztec civilization coincided with Europe's rediscovery of classical antiquity, and Tenochtitlan came to be regarded a "second Rome," or altera Roma. Iberia's past as the Roman province of Hispania served to both guide and critique the Spanish overseas mission. The dialogue that emerged between the Old World and the New World shaped a dual heritage into the unique culture of Nueva Espana. In this volume, ten eminent historians and archaeologists examine the analogies between empires widely separated in time and place and consider how monumental art and architecture created "theater states," a strategy that links ancient Rome, Hapsburg Spain, preconquest Mexico, and other imperial regimes.