| FIRST LECTURE: The Geopolitics of Urban History. Why not China? Why not Islam? Why did the power of Europe (and its ex-colonies) ended up prevailing in this millennium?. This class explores the historical evidence that the rise of Europe was not fated and necessary, but a contingent achievement that may not have taken place at all. It also examines the role that European cities had in this process. A hypothesis proposed by the historian Fernand Braudel is that a comparison between medieval Western towns, on one hand, and those of Islamic and Chinese towns, on the other, reveals a strikingly different dynamics. While the growth and change of many (though not all) nonwestern towns was fairly linear, Western urban dynamics was characterized by turbulence and self-stimulating processes of different kinds. |
