ABSTRACT
Since the publication of Mols’s informative book two studies of urban population have appeared. Three Thousand Years of Urban Growth, by Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox, is a massive collection of information about the size of cities.3 Its unsystematic character and, even worse, the authors’ reliance on suspect sources and their completely uncritical use of such sources renders the volume all but unusable. More systematic is the work of Paul Bairoch. He has published urban population estimates for Europe in several of his works (most fully in Tailles de villes), but their value to others remains limited because of the highly aggregative form of the published information (the smallest geographical unit is Europe as a whole) and the absence of any mention of sources or discussion of methodology in the works thus far published.4
