ABSTRACT
In the course of writing this book I have wandered rather far from my initial concern, which was to satisfy my curiosity about the number of cities and their sizes before the nineteenth century. Once I was in a position to describe the patterns of urban growth for the period 1500-1800 (part II) it became apparent that the cities of early modern Europe formed a larger entity - an urban system - that called for study in its own right (part III). This urban system was, of course, not an autonomous historical actor, but a product of decision-making: of people and their migration patterns; of the controllers of capital and their investment behaviour; of the state and its political decisions. I investigated only the first of these three determinants of urbanization in detail (part IV). Investment behaviour in particular merits much more attention than could be given to it here. But in each of these areas of decisionmaking I sought to show that the key to understanding urban change is to focus on the general processes and their differentiated effects on the system of cities rather than on the fate of individual cities. Thus I presented the demographic growth of cities as part of a general model of migration, and I suggested that the investment of capital in a city is not simply a discrete event but is commonly part of a larger process of organizational change or of the diffusion of an innovation.
