ABSTRACT
EMRys JONES1 has recently suggested that the popular term 'pre industrial city' is often used as a residual category, into which all cities that do not fit current Western patterns are placed. It may thus cover mediaeval European cities and all cities of most periods in countries which are not highly industrialized. Doubtless this is in part due to the cultural bias of Western writers ; this bias becomes most apparent when the development of cities is assumed to fall into a limited number of logically connected stages, with the folk society representing the one extreme and the highly industrialized society the other. Once this frame of reference is adopted, cities in other types of society need to be represented as intermediate groups along the road or roads. While the early presentations of this argument were very crude, it has recently received more substantial support from Sjoberg ;2 and the work of Reissman8 might be interpreted as a more sophisticated theory of stages.
