This chapter outlines attempts by global cities scholars to explain historic networks. Research in global cities studies shows that we are living in an urban age, a high period for intercity relations that promises a reconsideration of history. Today’s world city network emerged in tandem with major shifts in the global economy, along with the gradual erosion of national borders in many spheres of politics. Global cities studies pose two major questions for cities today: First, how are cities shaping globalization? Second, how is globalization shaping lived experiences in cities? Global cities studies, led by John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, and Peter J. Taylor presciently posed these questions in the midst of drastic contemporary changes in the architecture of the world economic system. The emphasis on late capitalism in world cities studies creates problems in the literature in need of challenge. This chapter stresses the need for a political history of city networks, identifying the absence of history of the literature as a flaw in need of change. Today’s world city network is far from a steady state or “end of history.”

The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.