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Some Reflections on the Pre-Industrial City*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Peter Burke
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Extract

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 2 , May 1975 , pp. 13 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank the members of the University of Sussex ‘work in progress’ history graduate seminar for their constructive and stimulating criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

References

Notes

1. Thomas, K. V., Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)Google Scholar; Macfarlane, A. D., Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mauro, F., Le XVIe siècle européen: aspects économiques (Paris, 1966), 280f.Google Scholar; Kula, W., ‘Il sottosviluppo economico in una prospettiva storica’ in Annali della fondazione Luigi Einaudi, iii (1969).Google Scholar

2. Cobb, R., The Police and the People (1970), xxi.Google Scholar

3. Sjoberg, G., The Preindustrial City (Glencoe, 1960)Google Scholar. For criticisms of this book see especially Mumford, L. in American Sociological Review, xxvi (1961)Google Scholar and Cox, O. C. in Sociological Quarterly, v (1964)Google Scholar. The debt of these reflections to Mumford will be obvious.

4. Howells, W. D., Venetian Life (rev. edn, Boston, 1907)Google Scholar; Vanel, G., Une grande ville aux 17e et 18e siècles (Caen, 1910).Google Scholar

5. Delumeau, J., Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du 16e siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1957–1959)Google Scholar; Heers, J., Gênes au 15e siècle (Paris, 1961)Google Scholar; Deyon, P., Amiens, capitale provinciale (Paris and The Hague, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bennassar, B., Valladolid au siècle d'or (Paris and The Hague, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gascon, R., Grand commerce et vie urbaine au 16e siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (Paris and The Hague, 1971)Google Scholar; Garden, M., Lyon et les lyonnais au 18e siècle (Paris, 1970).Google Scholar

6. Braudel, F., Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, I (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 8, ‘les villes’; Chaunu, P., La civilisation de l'Europe classique (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar, ch. 8, ‘la ville’; Bernard, L., The Emerging City: Paris in the Age of Louis XIV (Durham, N. C., 1970)Google Scholar; Pike, R., Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca and London, 1972)Google Scholar; Strauss, G., Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

7. Sjoberg, op. cit., 91f; Babeau, A., La ville sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1880), 239f., 371f.Google Scholar; Bernard, op. cit., 67f., 283f.

8. Sjoberg, op. cit., 203.

9. Bennassar, op. cit., 92, 232f.; Delumeau, op. cit., 371.

10. Wolff, P., Histoire de Toulouse (Toulouse, 1958), 257.Google Scholar

11. Sjoberg, op. cit., ch. 5 passim.

12. Ibid., esp. 220, 224.

13. On Venice, further references in Burke, P., Venice and Amsterdam (1974), 33fGoogle Scholar.; on Florence, Brucker, G., Renaissance Florence (New York, 1969), 89fGoogle Scholar.; on France, Babeau, op. cit., 50f.

14. Briggs, A., Victorian Cities (new edn, 1968), 204.Google Scholar

15. Sjoberg, op. cit., 286f., 209f.

16. Cipolla, C. M., Literacy and Development in the West (1969)Google Scholar, esp. 45f.; idem, Clocks and Culture (1967), passim. Cf. Le Goff, J., ‘Temps de l'eglise et temps de marchand’, in Annales E. S. C. (1960), 417f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Sjoberg, op. cit., 6.

18. The pioneering study here is of course that of Weber, Max, translated as The City (Glencoe, 1958)Google Scholar. On China, see Balazs, E., Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy (English translation, New Haven and London, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. 6, ‘Chinese towns’; Loewe, M.,Imperial China (1966)Google Scholar, ch. 8, ‘The growth of cities’; and Wheatley, P.,The Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971)Google Scholar. On Islam, von Grunebaum, G. E., Islam (1955)Google Scholar, ch. 8, ‘The structure of the Muslim town’; Hourani, A., in Hourani, A. and Stern, S. M. (eds), The Islamic City (1970)Google Scholar; Lapidus, I. M., Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge Mass., 1967)Google Scholar. On Africa, Herskovits, M. J., The Human Factor in Changing Africa (1962)Google Scholar, ch.9, ‘The city’; Miner, H., The Primitive City of Timbuctoo (rev. edn, New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Lloyd, P., ‘The Yoruba town today’ in Sociological Review, vii (1959)Google Scholar (special number on urbanisation in West Africa).

19. Sjoberg, op. cit., 87f.

20. Cf. Alexander, J. W., ‘The basic-nonbasic concept of urban economic functions’, in Mayer, H. M. and Kohn, C. F. (eds), Readings in Urban Geography (Chicago and London, 1959), 87f.Google Scholar

21. Garden, op. cit., 275f.; on Norwich, Corfield, P. in Clark, P. and Slack, P. (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns (1972).Google Scholar

22. For a dramatic account of urban deterioration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see de Seta, C., Storia della città di Napoli (new edn, Bari, 1973), 241f.Google Scholar

23. I wish to thank Colin Brooks, of the University of Sussex, for emphasizing this point to me, and the participants in the conference at Sorrento in 1973, ‘From the preindustrial city to the industrial city’, in particular Italo Insolera, for their part in stimulating the ideas expressed here.

24. Kellett, J. R., The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities (1969)Google Scholar; Dyos, H. J., Victorian Suburb (1961)Google Scholar; Warner, S. B. Jr, Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge Mass., 1962).Google Scholar

25. Rudé, G., Hanoverian London (1971), 86Google Scholar; Youngson, A. J., The Making of Classical Edinburgh (1966), 226f.Google Scholar

26. Bernard, op. cit., 24f., 128f.; Gascon, op. cit., 435; Garden, op. cit., 206.

27. Pike, op. cit., 111f.; Meijer, ‘Groei en bloei der stad’, in Bredius, A. (ed.), Amsterdam in de zeventiende eeuw, vol. I (The Hague, 1897)Google Scholar; Bernard, op. cit., 7f.; Summerson, J., Georgian London (rev. edn, 1970), 206f.Google Scholar

28. Mumford, L., The City in History (new edn, 1966), 421f., 446.Google Scholar

29. Garden, op. cit., 79f.; Thrupp, S., The Merchant Class of Medieval London (new edn, Ann Arbor, 1962), 206f.Google Scholar

30. A useful general discussion is Mousnier, R., Les hiérarchies sociales de 1450 à nos jours (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar, esp. chs 1–3.

31. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (1963)Google Scholar; Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974)Google Scholar; on Florence, Gilbert, F., Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, 1965), 23f.Google Scholar; on Lyons, Gascon, op. cit., 356f.; on Amsterdam, Burke, op. cit., 19f.

32. Briggs, op. cit., 223f.; Delumeau, op. cit., 230f., 327f.

33. The fullest study of this problem I know is Zanetti, D., Problemi alimentari di una economia preindustriale (Turin, 1964)Google Scholar, on Pavia 1398–1700.

34. On Lyons, Gutton, J.-P., La société et les pauvres (Paris, 1971), 231f., 289f., 431f.Google Scholar; on Paris, Bernard, op. cit., 147f.

35. Simmel, G., ‘Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben’, translated in Wolff, K. H. (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, 1950), 409f.Google Scholar; W. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 7, quoted by Williams, R., The Country and the City (1973), 149Google Scholar; Descartes, letter to Guez de Balzac, 5 May 1631; Sauval, H., Antiquités de la ville de Paris, posthumously published (Paris, 1724), 62Google Scholar; W. Thomas (1549) quoted in Thomas, K. V., Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 527.Google Scholar

36. Alberti, L. B., I libri della famiglia, ed. Romano, R. and Tenenti, A. (Turin, 1969)Google Scholar; the book was written in the 1430s and 1440s.