The Transformation of the World (57 page)

The nineteenth-century urbanization experiences of China and Japan were, to be sure, so different from each other that it would be misleading to speak of a common East Asian pattern. In Japan, paradoxically, state-initiated modernization actually led to a temporary
de
concentration: the abolition of the feudal principalities (daimyates, or
han
), the downgrading of castle towns as administrative centers, and the ending of the samurai's obligation to reside in them or at the shogun's court in Edo (Tokyo) increased horizontal mobility in the country, mainly to the advantage of medium-sized cities. In the transition from the Tokugawa era to the Meiji era, the population of Tokyo fell from more than a million to 860,000 in 1875—although this contained the seeds of future expansion, since much
daimyō
land in the area around Tokyo fell into the hands of the new government and would be used for urban development. In China, the negligible rise in the rate of urbanization may also be attributed to a modernization effect: that is, to the insertion of coastal regions into the world economy, and the rapid growth of a number of port cities, especially Shanghai. Urban population increases were visible almost exclusively in the Lower Yangtze and around Canton and Hong Kong. All in all, though, China remained as it had been at the beginning of the century: a markedly less urbanized country than Japan.

In the long term, the comparison with Europe is illuminating. Early modern Europe never reached the absolute urban population levels that China and Japan together displayed; East Asia also had many more
very
large
cities. Europe experienced a first urbanization surge after 1550, and a second after 1750;
⁴⁸
the share of its cities in the total population doubled between 1500 and 1800. But between 1650 and 1750 the degree of urbanization in Europe was lower than in Japan, the same as in the Lower Yangtze region, and above that of China as a whole. Europe's leap ahead in the nineteenth century was not entirely due to industrialization and the accompanying emergence of factory cities. It also had somewhat earlier roots in what Jan de Vries calls the “new urbanization” after 1750, which began in England and spread after the turn of the century to southern Europe, especially in small and medium-sized cities. The growth of
very large
cities was less spectacular, corresponding more or less to rises in the overall population; only the railroad increased their weight disproportionately, without ever resulting in “top-heavy urbanization” and generating the kind of megacities that would become common outside Europe in the twentieth century.

Hierarchies

In eighteenth-century Europe (apart from Russia and Spain), then, a finely graded hierarchy of cities gradually took shape, in which each size category was well represented. Jan de Vries, the cautious empiricist who generally much prefers to speak of “microregions” than of whole countries or Europe as a whole, thinks that the evenness of the rank/size distribution justifies the idea of a characteristic European pattern of urbanization.
⁴⁹
The cities of Europe (west of Russia) formed a geographically linked, vertically differentiated system with a high degree of interaction, to which urban centers in the colonies also belonged in ways that are still imperfectly understood. De Vries points out that some countries in late nineteenth-century Europe—perhaps for the first time in history—crossed the threshold beyond which the main source of urbanization was not migration from the country or abroad but the process of natural reproduction within their own boundaries. By contrast, although the large North American centers of immigration were at a level of economic development comparable to that of northwestern Europe, they did not become self-reproductive until the First World War.
⁵⁰
Considerable skepticism is doubtless warranted regarding the (often ideologically motivated) talk of Europe's distinctive historical trajectory. But there appears to be solid empirical evidence for the distinctiveness of its path of urbanization.

Scholars who study urbanization tend to make comparative assessments of city structures; they check whether the relationship among large, medium, and small cities “looks right.” From this point of view, not only Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany but also the United States had a “mature” urban hierarchy in the nineteenth century. This was not true of Denmark or Sweden, given the dominance of Copenhagen and Stockholm, nor was it true of Russia, where there were no really large cities apart from Saint Petersburg and Moscow: the third in size, Saratov, had barely one-tenth of the population of Saint Petersburg. The typical governor's capital, never amassing a population higher than 50,000, never outgrowing the administrative and military functions that it derived from the central state, was only marginally affected by the dynamic forces active in late Tsarist Russia.
⁵¹
The lack of a finely graded hierarchy of cities was a major obstacle in the modernization of Russia.

Japan, on the other hand, came close to the ideal of a city system with a wide unbroken spectrum of population size. So too had China in former times, although in the nineteenth century it lacked small cities in the 10,000–20,000 range, and rapid growth of large cities was limited to a few metropolises, nearly all of them on or near the coast. The suspicion that such gaps and disproportions on the size axis point to weak trade links among cities is nevertheless contradicted by the findings of Chinese historians, who have been able to demonstrate the increasing integration of a “national” market. In other words, it is problematic to start from the “aesthetic,” Western-inspired norm of a uniform hierarchy of cities without clarifying precisely how different structures operate economically.
In China, apart from the few coastal metropolises, the cities that grew in population and average size were mostly those that were not administrative centers and could engage in commerce with little state regulation (experts in the field speak of “nonadministrative market centers”). A “nonideal” hierarchy might therefore perfectly well have had a certain functional point.

3 Between Deurbanization and Hypergrowth

Contractions

We have to be careful with the evaluations we make. Fast quantitative growth of cities is not per se a sign of impetuous modernization, and deurbanization is not always, though it is often, the expression of crisis and stagnation. In Japan as in Europe, the so-called proto-industrialization of the eighteenth century went hand in hand with emigration from the large cities. In fact, deurbanization was a feature of various parts of Europe before 1800—for example, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.
⁵²
However, the impoverished life of cities in southern Europe expressed a general tendency for the focus of European urban culture to shift toward the North and the Atlantic. Only around 1840 did the decline of older cities in the South come to a halt.

One exception, though, was the Balkans. It was highly urbanized in comparison with other regions at a similar level of economic development. This was not the result of a specifically nineteenth-century dynamic but the legacy of earlier developments: above all, the high value that the Ottomans attached to urban culture, and the importance of fortified garrison cities. After the end of Ottoman rule, a number of Balkan countries went through a phase of deurbanization. A particularly dramatic instance was Serbia, during the turmoil that lasted from 1789 to 1815. In Belgrade, which had approximately 6,000 houses in 1777, only 769 were recorded in 1834.
⁵³
The Serbian revolution destroyed the institutions of the Ottomans with such thoroughness that even their urban structure was dispensable. A similar process occurred after 1878 in Montenegro, and in Bulgaria there was at least a long urban recession.

Deurbanization had other causes in Southeast Asia, where a trade boom after 1750 had led to strong city growth. By the early nineteenth century Bangkok, for example, held one-tenth of the Siamese population,
⁵⁴
and the picture was similar in the multiple states of Malaya. As rice growing spread in the 1850s, however, a new “peasantization” began to appear, and with it an increase in the relative size of the rural population. Between 1815 and 1890 the share of the Javanese population living in cities with more than two thousand inhabitants fell from 7 percent to 3 percent, as a direct result of the growing export orientation of the economy. By 1930 Southeast Asia was one of the least urbanized regions in the world: only noncolonized Siam retained the traditional dominance that its capital had had since 1767; all the colonial capitals were functionally less important
than the metropolises of the dynastic past had been.
⁵⁵
Only in the Philippines, with its highly decentralized political conditions, had no cities functioned before the colonial period as sites of compressed power; this was why the Spanish founding of Manila in 1565 concentrated administrative, military, ecclesiastical, and economic functions to an extent never previously seen. The Philippines was an early and lasting example of the top-heavy structure later characteristic also of such diverse countries as Siam and Hungary.
⁵⁶
The Dutch presence on Java began only a few decades later than the Spanish presence on Luzon, the main island of the Philippines, yet Batavia—whose economy, like Manila's, relied on an active Chinese population—never achieved complete hegemony over the princely seats of the native rulers. In the Philippines secondary centers, all relatively weak, took shape only toward the end of the nineteenth century.
⁵⁷

It depended on circumstances, then, whether colonial rule promoted, obstructed, or reversed urbanization. In India the urban population probably did not grow between 1800 and 1872. Nearly all the large cities from the pre-British period lost inhabitants: Agra, Delhi, Varanasi, Patna, and many more. In conquering the Subcontinent between 1765 and 1818, the British had taken over highly developed urban systems, but the fighting had destroyed a great deal of urban and interurban infrastructure, often including famed long-distance roads. The British introduced new taxes and monopolies, many of which made indigenous trade more difficult, so that merchants often abandoned the cities and retreated to the countryside. The disarming of indigenous troops, the decline of urban industries such as weapons production, and the dismantling of princely administrations contributed to the process of deurbanization. The tendency turned round in the early 1870s, but only slowly. In 1900 the degree of urbanization in India was not significantly higher than it had been a hundred years earlier.
⁵⁸

Deurbanization of a society entails shrinkage of individual cities.
⁵⁹
As we have seen, Tokyo temporarily experienced this, while other Asian cities did not recover from earlier destruction by the end of the century. Isfahan, the glittering capital of the Safavid shahs, which had a population of 600,000 in 1700, remained a shadow of its former self (with only 50,000 inhabitants in 1800) after Afghan invaders laid it waste in 1722. Agra, the capital of the Mogul emperors, declined after the fall of the empire and regained only around 1950 the population of half a million that it had had in 1600. Its central political role was irretrievably lost. Many cities in Asia or Africa collapsed when the states with which they had grown were destroyed by colonialism, or when new trade routes passed them by. In early modern Europe, the decline of a city had been nothing unusual. Fast-growing cities such as London, Paris, or Naples coexisted with stagnating or shrinking ones. Many medium-sized German cities expanded little between the Reformation and the middle of the nineteenth century: Nuremberg, Regensburg, Mainz, and Lübeck, to name but a few. Venice, Antwerp, Seville, Leiden, or Tours had fewer inhabitants in 1850 than in 1600. Rome in 1913, with a total of
600,000, had climbed above one-half of the dimensions it had in antiquity. If we assume that roughly 150,000 people lived in Periclean Athens, the Greek capital did not regain its ancient size before 1900. For almost the whole of Europe an upward trend had set in by the 1850s; urbanization spread to every country on the continent—even to bottom-ranking Portugal. Not a single one of Europe's major cities would subsequently lose population. The phenomenon of urban decline was for the time being a thing of the past.

Supergrowth

If we take individual cities, growth was especially spectacular where the statistics started from zero. It is hardly surprising to find that cities grew nowhere as fast as in Australia or the United States. In 1841 Melbourne, the capital of the colony of Victoria (and of its successor, the present-day federal state), was a large village with a population of 3,500. Then came the gold rush and the rapid growth of Victoria's economy in general, so that by 1901 the city had passed the 500,000 mark.
⁶⁰
At the turn of the century Australia had a top-heavy hierarchy of cities, with a number of large cities that functioned at once as state capitals, international ports, and economic centers, and a series of little-developed medium-sized cities. It was a “third world pattern,” but in this case it did not prevent considerable dynamism. Statistically, Australia was one of the most highly urbanized regions in the world.
⁶¹

Colonial North America was a rural world, in which the towns were so small that there could be no question of urban anonymity. Only a few—Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, and Charleston—reached the size of an English provincial city. The big urbanization push in the United States came after 1830 and lasted a hundred years; the share of the population living in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants has not appreciably increased since 1930.
⁶²
Even more than in Europe, urbanization in the United States was geared to the new forms of transport: canal traffic and the railroad. A city like Denver now became possible without any link to a waterway—a pure creation of the railroad, which alone joined up individual cities into a system.
⁶³
Even in the Atlantic Northeast, with its old cities from the colonial period, the railroad brought new centers into being and generally achieved their horizontal and vertical compression into an urban system.