ABSTRACT
Urban development in the ancient period reached its highest point in the Roman Empire, especially during the first through the third centuries a.d. As the empire expanded, it opened avenues of trade and increased the volume of administration to be performed. For a long period lasting into the seventeenth century, the context in which urban development progressed consisted of a small-scale handicraft economy which supplied a long-distance trade in luxury items and a highly localized exchange of a limited variety of ordinary consumer goods. Trade in services as well as in goods must expand and diversify, for trade is the means of providing an urban population with sustenance. Through the course of history to the end of the nineteenth century, then, the center of gravity of urban development had moved westward and northward. Urban growth in the new nations is reminiscent in several respects of that which occurred in Europe a hundred years or more earlier.
