ABSTRACT
Urbanist theorists of transition to capitalism have never depended solely on an internal account of European history. Much of the cultural resonance and explanatory power of urbanist theory has been based on the proposition that European, or more precisely Western European, cities had a unique developmental significance compared with the cities of the non-European world. Such comparisons are evident, for example, in the contrasts drawn by eighteenth and nineteenth century observers between what they saw as Europe’s dynamic, emancipatory urban legacy, and the despotic stagnant cities of the Orient, prior to European contact (Marx, 1965). It is not too difficult to perceive in such contrast a rather crude ideological legitimation of Western claims to cultural superiority. Further disquiet arises when the extremely favourable reactions of Western travellers such as Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant, towards the scale and dynamic character of certain non-Western cities are taken into account. (For Marco Polo’s comments on China see Balazs, 1954.)
A more sophisticated statement of Western-oriented comparative urban historical sociology was provided by Max Weber (1968) in the course of his explanation of why modern capitalism and rationality developed in the West and not elsewhere. For Weber, as we have seen, the Western city with its purported characteristics of political and juridical autonomy on a rational legal basis, articulated by a discrete burgher class, contrasts with the internally fragmented, non-autonomous urban centres of the world beyond. Although Weber places some emphasis on the
commercial and geopolitical dynamics of urban-based civilizations like Islam, he draws a qualitative distinction between Western and non-Western cities. Contrasts of this type have remained a prominent reference point in most subsequent literature on the role of cities in different civilizations such as Balazs (1964) and Elvin (1984) on China, and Hourani (1970) and Stern (1970) on the Islamic world.
