ABSTRACT
There is a sense in which theories linking city life with the development of capitalism represent one particular version of a more general thesis in which the city is connected with the advent and expansion of civilization itself. Etymologically both terms do, of course, have a common linguistic foundation in the set of Latin terms associated with citizenship and with the citizenry as a political community. The emergence of the concept of civilization in eighteenth century Europe (Febvre, 1973) involved a strongly ethnocentric view of social evolution. Defined in its most simple terms as a valued way of life, ‘something great and beautiful; something which is nobler, more comfortable and better both morally and materially than anything outside it’ (ibid., p. 220), the notion of civilization was intimately linked to the ‘city’ and to the idea of ‘progress’. This set of terms were seen as depicting coterminous features of occidental history from Graeco-Roman to modern times. Within this ethnocentric framework, ‘civilization’ became a singular unitary phenomenon distinguishing the history of the West from various ‘savage’ or ‘barbaric’ societies elsewhere.
