The Origin of Premodern Western Cities

Bret Devereaux writes about the origin of cities. He critiques a fantasy fiction-oriented YouTube vlogger who isn’t a trained historian, and in his critique, he expounds on the origin of cities, as coming purely from extraction, either by temples or by kings. I do not wish to contest Bret in Ancient history, where most of the examples in his post are drawn. But once one gets to the second millennium and cities are more visible to us in economic history, this is no longer the only origin of cities. Some emerge for commercial purposes, and only become sites of royal extraction after they’ve proven their economic value. My training, to be clear, is not in history. But my work in transportation has compelled me to understand not just transport engineering but also urbanism and urban histories, and in practice this has meant the histories of the largest cities of the developed world today, skewed toward older ones (more London and Paris, less Seoul), which have had a longer period during…

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