ABSTRACT
Every sedentary society has built cities, for even in a subsistence economy essential functions of exchange and of organization are most conveniently performed in a central location on behalf of a wider countryside. In Western Europe the city has been the base of an independent entrepreneur group which has successfully challenged and broken the authority of the traditional order. China and Europe have been the two great poles of world civilization, and an examination of the different roles which their cities played may help to elucidate other differences between them. The cities of Western Europe have been, at least since the high middle ages, centers of intellectual ferment; of economic change; and thus of opposition to the central authority. In northwest Europe the city has been a consistent seat of radicalism. Large cities seem to have been proportionately more numerous in China than in Europe until the nineteenth century, and until the eighteenth century urbanism may have been higher.
