The Transformation of the World (59 page)

The openness of city systems to the outside world is a direct result of constant circulation. Networks are the product of human action; they have no “objective” existence. Historians, too, must try to see them within the perspective of their creators and users. Networks are also reshaped internally: the relations among their various hubs, the cities, are constantly shifting. If a particular city stagnates or “goes into decline,” this also must be evaluated in the context of the city system of which it is part. City systems often display much persistence in change: thus, no completely new city has broken through to real preeminence anywhere in Europe during the last century and a half. It may also happen that the overall level of urbanization remains the same even though the system undergoes tectonic shifts internally; shrinkage and loss of function on the part of one city may be offset by growth elsewhere. In India many have nostalgically mourned the decline of old seats of residence, failing to see that the economic, and to some extent cultural, dynamic often switched to smaller market towns at a lower level in the hierarchy of functions and prestige. New patterns may, as it were, emerge in the shadows behind “official” urban geographies.
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Cities that are dominant in both models—that function, in other words, both as important hubs in horizontal networks and as the summits of vertical hierarchies—may be called “metropolises.” Furthermore, a metropolis is a large city that (1) gives widely recognized expression to a certain culture, (2) controls an extensive hinterland, and (3) attracts large numbers of people from other areas to come and live in it. If, in addition, a metropolis forms part of a global network, it deserves the title of a “world city.” Were there “world cities” in the early modern period and in the nineteenth century? It is difficult to give an answer, because the term has several meanings in current usage. It would be tautological and much too simple to define them as cities “of actual or potential global importance”; Uruk in ancient Sumeria would have counted as the first “world city” by that criterion.
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Fernand Braudel defines a world city, rather more precisely, as one that dominates its own circumscribed “world economy,” as Venice or Amsterdam did for a time.
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Only in the nineteenth century, he argues, did a
globally hegemonic
city emerge in a single specimen: London. After 1920 its place was taken by New York. Yet this, too, is a highly simplified view of things: if there was anything like a “cultural capital of the world” in the nineteenth century, it was Paris rather than London, with strong competition around 1800 and
around 1900 from Vienna (which carried scarcely any weight in world trade or finance). Nor was the “changeover” from London to New York so neat that it can be dated to a precise year; London remained the heart of a world empire, and it kept its central financial position even after its relative importance in trade and industry receded.

Nowadays it is more usual to speak of “world cities” or “global cities” in the plural, meaning that a global city is one among several nationally rooted “global players,” rather than just one highly influential metropolis or heart of a great empire.
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They are part of a global system, in which the links
among
world cities in different countries are stronger than their integration with a national or imperial hinterland. Such detachment from a territorial base is possible only as a result of today's information and communications technologies.
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Many of the parameters that permit statements to be made about a city's ranking in the global hierarchy first took shape toward the end of the nineteenth century: for example, the presence of transnational corporations, with their own internal hierarchy of headquarters and branches, or of international organizations, or insertion into global media networks.

Empirical studies of the manner and frequency of contact among the largest world cities have not yet been undertaken for the nineteenth century. If they were, they would probably lead to the conclusion that only late-twentieth-century technologies brought about a special system embracing the metropolises, a true system of world cities. Before intercontinental telephony, radio communication, and airline links became normal and regular parts of life, it cannot be said that the largest and most important cities in various continents formed a permanent fabric of interaction and communication. Later, of course, satellite technology and the Internet brought a further quantum leap in networking. In this respect the nineteenth century—when crossing the Atlantic was still an expensive adventure, not an affordable routine—appears as the dull prehistory of the present day. This even includes the age of the zeppelin and the heyday of the fast, comfortable ocean liner able to complete the transatlantic journey in four to five days, which began in 1897 with the introduction of the first superliner, Norddeutscher Lloyd's 14,000-ton
Kaiser Wilhelm der Große
. The continuous linking of London, Zurich, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, and a few other top metropolises is an innovation dating from around 1960, which became possible only with swift and frequent airline travel.

4 Specialized Cities, Universal Cities

Pilgrimage Sites, Spas, Mining Towns

From a certain size up, it is not easy to classify cities in terms of a single function; they play several roles at once. Cities are mostly pluralist. In every age, however, this does not apply to ones that concentrate labor of a highly specialized
kind. In the mid-seventeenth century Potosí, situated 4,000 meters above sea level in an extremely inhospitable part of what is now Bolivia, had a population of around 200,000; this made it the largest city in the Americas—a position due entirely to the fact that the most extensive silver deposits in the New World were to be found there. Significantly larger still, in the early eighteenth century, was Jingdezhen in the central Chinese province of Jiangxi, which produced pottery for the domestic and international market and, until the advent of the machine age, was probably the largest manufacturing center anywhere in the world. In the nineteenth century there were also single-function cities of an older kind: the religious pilgrimage sites, which, though with a highly mobile and fluctuating population, are themselves often stable over a long period of time. In addition to ancient cities such as Mecca and Benares, many new sites sprang up in Hindu and Buddhist, Muslim and Christian countries, such as Lourdes on the northern edge of the Pyrenees, which shot to fame in the early 1860s. Pilgrimages to such places were big business, never more so than in the late nineteenth century. The Dutch Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, who spent a year in 1884–85 in Arabia studying Muslim scholarship, noted that rampant commercialism was changing the character of the population of Mecca and had caused much disappointment among pious pilgrims;
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things must have been similar in Lourdes. Charismatic movements can concentrate large numbers of people in a brief space of time. Not long after Omdurman was founded in 1883, the capital of the Mahdi movement in Sudan constantly had up to 150,000 people within its boundaries: religious devotees and soldiers; it was hard to tell the two apart.
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Open at its back to the desert, where the Mahdi recruited most of his followers, the city was fortified on the Nile side—the opposite of the situation at Khartoum. It was at once a religious center and a military camp. Nothing remained of it after British troops crushed the movement in 1898.

Other kinds of single-function localities first emerged in the nineteenth century. The railroad created the junction city, where different lines crossed: good examples are Clapham Junction in South London, Kansas City, Roanoke in Virginia, and Changchun in Manchuria (a Chinese backwater astride the eastern railroad that the Russians built to China in 1898). Similarly, Nairobi grew out of a settlement that the British had built to serve as the logistical center for the construction of the Uganda railroad.
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Railroad workshops, too, were usually located in such places. If these cities also provided the main connection between river and railroad, their opportunities for growth were especially favorable.

A further nineteenth-century novelty was the leisure and bathing resort. This must be distinguished from the spa town of the eighteenth century, where members of the upper classes traveled to fortify themselves by “taking the waters,” and to mix in high society: Karlsbad in Bohemia, Spa in Belgium, Vichy in France, Yalta in Crimea, Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden in Germany were celebrated examples. They were also Western outposts of eastern European aristocracies and increasingly—in various degrees of exclusiveness and expense—magnets for the
middle-class families of bankers and senior officials, considered slightly disreputable because of the gambling associated with them. Bad Ems, where Wilhelm I of Prussia took his cures, was the scene of the diplomatic imbroglio in 1870 that made it easier for Bismarck (kept up to date by telegraph) to “provoke a war in defense of the German nation.”
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Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria opted many times for Bad Ischl—when he did not head straight for Nizza where, in 1895, he shared the same grand hotel with the former British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. The two aging gentlemen did not, however, exchange a word with each other.
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Democratization of the seaside vacation originated in England and Wales, and it was there, too, that a “holiday industry” first began to develop as an increasingly important factor in the economy. In 1881 there were 106 recognized coastal resorts in England and Wales; in 1911 there were already 145, with 1.6 million people living in them (roughly 4.5 percent of the total population). Demand grew in the sector, trickling down from the upper classes to other parts of an increasingly prosperous society, and the supply adjusted more and more smoothly to the needs of the different strata. In the same way that the older-style spas specialized in the treatment of certain disorders, the various coastal resorts were each geared to a clientele with a particular social profile. There had already been such a hierarchy in eighteenth-century England, with the aristocratic and upper-middle-class towns of Bath and Tunbridge Wells at the top. By mid-century, to the north in Lancashire, some members of the “lower classes” had discovered for themselves the joys of sea bathing.

The bathing resort was a special kind of urban environment, not centered on parks, cure facilities, and thermal baths but altogether geared to the beaches along the open shore. The social climate here was less formal than in the inland spas; life was more relaxed, status distinctions had to be displayed less often, and children found the latitude they were otherwise denied. The average sojourn was far shorter than in the spa resorts: one stayed for a week or two, not several months. By 1840 the bathing resort had taken shape in England and Wales, with most of the characteristic features that we still see today. The prototype was Blackpool on the West Coast, whose 47,000 permanent residents catered (in 1900) for more than 100,000 vacationers. On offer were the early achievements of a special “fun architecture,” originally developed for various world exhibitions, and here presented—together with a circus, opera, and ballroom—in the imposing form of an imitation Eiffel Tower and a walk-in old English village.
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Subsequently the seaside resort owed its growth to increased leisure time, greater affordability, and good railway and highway connections. By the turn of the century there were coastal resorts of more or less the same kind all around the central Atlantic and the Mediterranean, on the shorelines and islands of the Pacific, on the Baltic Sea, in the Crimea, and in South Africa. In China, people had traditionally gone to the mountains for relaxation; hot springs, not the sea, were the places for bathing. The opening of the Beidaihe resort on the Gulf of Zhili was mainly for the
sake of the Europeans who, by the end of the nineteenth century, were living in large numbers in the nearby cities of Beijing and Tianjin. Today its hundreds of hotels attract droves of tourists, the best beaches being reserved, of course, for members of the party and state leadership. The seaside town is unambiguously an early nineteenth-century Western invention, whose origins went back to preindustrial times, and which has continued to spread around the globe until the present age of the postindustrial service society.
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Another new form to be found on every continent was the mining town, already exemplified by Potosí in the early modern period. In the nineteenth century, societies dug deeper underground than ever before. Coal mining provided the energy source for industrialization and was, in turn, made more effective by a number of technical improvements. The specialized mining town became emblematic of the epoch. There were instances in Silesia and the Ruhr, in Lorraine, in the English Midlands, in the Ukrainian Donbass, and in the Appalachians. Soon after 1900, coalfields also began to be opened up in northern China and Manchuria, where it was partly British and partly Japanese businesses that introduced the latest technology. Industrialization also generated demand for other mining products, while the science of geology and advances in mine construction and extraction made it possible to work new deposits. Not only the technically and financially straightforward panning of gold in California and Australia, but also the opening of new mines that required considerable investment, led to outbreaks of gold fever and ultrarapid concentrations of laborers. In Chile, copper was already mined in colonial times alongside gold and silver, and in the 1840s there was a sharp rise in output and exports of the metal. For several more decades, however, copper mining remained in most cases a small-scale craft operation; steam engines were rarely deployed. Even after modern technology became the norm around the turn of the century, no real mining towns sprang up in Chile. Miners' camps tended to be isolated enclaves on the margins of the local economy.
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