Chapter 8 shows that Palladio’s design for the unbuilt wings would have reinforced the villa’s hybrid character through their allusions to a range of urban and rural building types. Their evocation of the ancient triumphal arch would have made a bold claim for Pisani hegemony in Montagnana.

Identified by Immanuel Wallerstein as the first true hegemon, the Dutch Empire dominated maritime commerce in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam emerged as the world’s alpha city, the site of the first true global multinational corporations. In tandem with corporate activities including the founding of New York City, Cape Town, and Jakarta, Amsterdam established the first modern stock market. It also solidified the North–South power imbalance. European powers extracted the labor and raw materials of far-flung colonies, refining them at higher value. The under-populated Dutch Empire relied on forced migration and slave labor to produce valuable goods such as sugar, tobacco, and spices. This chapter traces the emergence of a city network in the Low Countries that prefigured its independence from Spain, and the construction of its own imperial network. The Dutch city network expanded globally, establishing critical nodes in West Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia to manage the flow of resources and labor. Amsterdam’s place at the top of the world city hierarchy led to rising inequality, prefiguring modern urban “command centers.”

Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.

From the early second millennium AD more hierarchically organised societies marked by the rise of southern Africa’s first states developed in the north of southern Africa, culminating in Great Zimbabwe and its successors. This chapter outlines the processes involved, including the roles played by hunter-gatherer communities (for example at K2 and Mapungubwe) and the histories of farming societies on their periphery (notably those of Zimbabwe’s Nyanga Highlands). Much of this research is new and the past two decades have also seen challenges emerge to the importance previously accorded Indian Ocean trade in accounting for the emergence of social complexity, to the historical relationships between major centres (K2, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami), and to understandings of the internal organisation, chronology, size, and functioning of those sites. Discussing these debates – particularly those relating to the settlement organisation of Great Zimbabwe and other stone-walled sites and the social implications of this – involves considering how far political action should be understood in terms of Indigenous, rather than Western, concepts.

Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.

This chapter introduces key structures and developments in the cities of late antique southern Gaul as relevant as contexts for the development of popular culture at this time, with reference to archaeological as well as literary evidence. While Arles and Marseille come under particular focus, other smaller urban centres including Aix and Narbonne are also considered. The general built urban environment is discussed first, then the occupations, social status and identities of the cities’ inhabitants. Next, the impact of the church upon the late ancient city, social and political as well as topographical, comes into focus. Urban social relations are examined before the final section looks at the transformation of performance and leisure in late antiquity.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Artisan fishers broke the early medieval pattern of subsistence fishing. Participants in Europe’s medieval ‘Commercial Revolution’, artisans made their living by catching fish to sell on a local market. Evidence of such people appears around 1000 CE in commercially precocious northern Italy but also in England, France, the Rhineland, and elsewhere. Commonly they arose at or near emerging towns, where skilled subsistence fishers might offer a surplus catch to other non-agricultural specialists. The chapter examines the social position of these household-based fishers, their traditional small-scale technologies, and the collective organizations (guilds) used to manage their human and environmental relations. It then turns to the urban markets where these men and their wives provided fresh fish from nearby waters. In larger towns professional fishmongers consolidated catches from various regional habitats, while communal concern for a safe and abundant supply caused municipal authorities to regulate market dealings. By the late twelfth century the interplay of seasonal demand (Lent) and supply (runs of migratory fish) coupled with cultural criteria of taste and quality shaped fish prices. Whether in great cities like Venice or Paris or small towns on the Castilian plateau or English coast, local markets offered consumers the regional fish they ate.

The chapter aims to illustrate the transformations that took place in the urban centers of Latium vetus during the 4th and 3th centuries BCE, the chronological period that includes the last, turbulent decades of the political autonomy of the cities of Latium and that sees, after the dissolution of the Latin League, the constitutional redefinition of the subjected communities and their inclusion in the political, military, and economic dynamics of Rome. At the same time, the chapter proposes to evaluate the role of Latin urban culture in the process of Roman expansion in Latium adiectum and in the wider colonial phenomenon: This shows extensive territorial reorganization and newly founded urban centers which are hardly “Roman” and are more related to or derived from the urban Latin tradition (for in terms of settlement principles, spatial organization, use of materials, and construction techniques). The communities of ancient Latium, in fact, must have had a primary role in the process of conquest and “Romanization” of the Peninsula, a process that because of its dynamics, its manifestations, and its outcomes, would be more correctly defined as “Latinization.”

When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.