The Historical Dimension

The history of urban settlement is as old as civilization, but reliable figures on size of population date back no further than the late nineteenth century. Even contemporary figures on urban size are bedevilled by inconsistencies in the definition of functional urban areas. Archaeology and literature give little better than orders of magnitude of the population of leading cities from their origins in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys around 8000 BCE and in the Yellow and Yangtze Valleys from around 4000 BCE (Morris, 2010a,b). Comparative urban history is therefore a matter of looking for patterns and very long-term trends. This survey takes its starting point as the Roman and Chinese empires of around the beginning of the first millennium, thus a time period of about 2000 years.