26 - Imperial cities

Summary

Imperial cities represent intricate intersections of power, cultures, and landscapes, and can only be understood within their broader geopolitical and human context. This chapter focuses on the cases provided by great imperial cities in three different cultures: Rome, Tenochtitlan, and the various Assyrian capital cities. Since empires are unique, superlative kinds of political organization, imperial cities too should be seen as a special kind of urban form, having distinctive traits and markers in comparison with non-imperial settlements. The people who live there often represent an even more exceptional assemblage than the townscape surrounding them, in terms of resource accumulation, socioeconomic differentiation, functional specialization, cultural sophistication, ethnic composition, multilingualism, and much else. Just as the capital city in many ways mirrors the imperial structure that generated or appropriated it, so the city itself transforms the hinterland around itself but also the furthermost countryside of the empire.