Teotihuacan is often viewed as an impressive ancient city, but it must be understood as a regional phenomenon that included the city, its suburban periphery and surrounding countryside, as well as more distant rural settlements and populations as part of its sociospatial landscape. The urbanization of Teotihuacan was concurrently a process of ruralization of the surrounding region. This chapter explores Teotihuacan both internally and regionally, in an attempt to consider the social terrain of this early state from a holistic perspective. It discusses current conceptualizations, based on archaeological research, of Teotihuacan's political development and the organization of its rural and urban communities. Additional archaeological research at Teotihuacan period settlements across the Basin of Mexico is needed for fully comprehending the regional economic structure of this ancient state. Abundant research focused within the urban core continues to bring city life at Teotihuacan into focus, from its economic organization and socioeconomic disparities to the materialization of its governing institutions.

The growth of cities fundamentally reorganizes economic, social, and political relationships, defines subjects, and reconfigures physical landscapes, although these effects vary in different cultural traditions and natural environments This chapter considers the social and physical environments of urban systems both within cities themselves, and in the rural hinterlands they create and modify. The reorganization of space and of human relationships in cities begins with their initial settlement and construction. Economies are transformed by the concentration of population in cities. Archaeological research points to a similar process in the emergence of Tiwanaku in the Andean high plateau, or altiplano. Spatially divided compounds and barrios provided residence for kin-based or otherwise intimately linked urban communities in Tiwanaku. Childe's notion of the Urban Revolution suggests that the construction of cities and the associated changes in political authority, economic organization, and identities was a rapid if not instantaneous change.

This chapter outlines economic organization and activity in late-eighteenth-century north India. One way to penetrate the diverse historical experience of various parts of north India in the period is to get a sense of how the economy was organized in the middle of the eighteenth century in terms of different types of trade. By distinguishing between trade in luxury goods, wholesale commodity trade, and localized exchanges around towns and cities and within complexes of related villages, one can obtain a rough picture of economic organization applicable to north India in general. The chapter also emphasizes the pivotal role of the state of transportation in the Mughal period. It shows that the expansion of the commodity trade down the Ganges river, a consequence of peace and security and the connection to the world economy via Calcutta, is the key factor for the economic history of the region. The chapter also reviews the changes in north Indian agriculture in the nineteenth century.

In south India, handicrafts were based almost exclusively on manual labour and development of professional habits. Non-agricultural production demonstrated a great variety of forms of economic organization and of methods of integration into the macro-system of the economy. The system of inter-community natural unity of crafts and agriculture was sufficiently flexible to survive for a long time. Numerically the most important branches of rural commodity producing crafts were weaving and oil-pressing. Urban crafts were developed in India from the ancient period and distinguished by the high quality of goods. Indian artisans achieved high artistic skill especially in textile production. The concentration of textile workers in the sea-ports of the Coromandel Coast was enhanced. The majority of urban artisans were commodity producers. Economically the most important and organizationally and technologically the most developed industry was shipbuilding.