Conclusion

Summary

The early growth of Barcelona and the formation of its patriciate form a small part of a much larger theme: the economic take-off of the West. While there can be little doubt that towns prospered and expanded in conjunction with a spectacular long-term rise in agricultural productivity after the millennium, situating urban communities within the broad advance of material culture has proven a particularly elusive problem in recent historiography. Once regarded as economic innovators dominated by a commercial bourgeoisie, medieval towns now have assumed many of the social characteristics of the rural world that surrounded them and supplied their food, revenues, and capital. As what to earlier generations appeared a gaping chasm separating feudal and bourgeois has narrowed, the distinctiveness of early urban societies has diminished. To speak of the “birth” of medieval towns, or in the Mediterranean, a region of ancient civic life, of their “rebirth” has an anachronistic ring, since the metaphor implies the emergence of an autonomous, clearly distinguished social and political entity. If abstract definitions of the town have been put to rest, alongside them lies the stark town–country dichotomy so central to classical theories of political economy from Adam Smith to Karl Marx. As a result, recent scholarship has emphasized the rural dimensions apparent in medieval urban economies and societies to such an extent that it threatens to obliterate the distinction between town and country.