Cities in World History - Power PDF

POWER The exercise of power, the capacity to limit other people’s freedom of action and to curb their behaviour, even against their resistance, evidently depends on each party’s available means. These means range from persuasion and economic incentives to threat or effective use of physical coercion...

POWER The exercise of power, the capacity to limit other people’s freedom of action and to curb their behaviour, even against their resistance, evidently depends on each party’s available means. These means range from persuasion and economic incentives to threat or effective use of physical coercion. The quality of the means of power changes with technological development, the quantity varies as a function of the possibilities, at any given time or place, of concentration and accumulation. These factors depend on a society’s value orientations and the technology available to it to exploit the physical environment, but also on the degrees of stratification and differentiation. Numerous towns of medieval Europe developed in a period of rapid commercialization; they thus commanded rich and new types of resource extraction within a non-centralized society. This created excellent conditions for the rise of the self-governing European city, defined by Max Weber by an exclusive citizenship that was grounded in written charters. He argued for the distinctive importance of communal civic institutions for the cohesion, identity, and economic development of Western cities, above all their ‘at least partial autonomy and autocephaly, thus also administration by authorities in the election of whom the burghers participated’ Based upon the power of the Western cities, new forms of political participation arose that included representation from below. Yet this kind of urban self-governance did not exist in all of Europe; in addition, following the process of state-formation, the majority of the typical Weberian self-governing cities had to yield most of their powers to the newly unified territorial states. ECOLOGICAL CONDITIONS AND RESOURCE EXTRACTION Given the basic fact that urban development can only occur where and when a substantial agrarian surplus is durably generated, it follows that the dimensions of urbanization in pre-industrial societies varied greatly over time and space. As a general rule, one can observe that the earliest growth of cities occurred in regions where a moderately warm and humid climate was combined with abundant irrigation as well as easy transportation facilities on rivers or along coasts. The alluvial plains along the Indus and the Ganges with their tributaries constituted the backbone of an irrigation system which increased the agricultural productivity in such a way that cities with a population estimated at tens of thousands could develop in the period from around 2500 to 1500 BCE. From the 10th to the 18th centuries CE, urbanization grew steadily, concentrated in 120 major centres, to an estimated overall 15 per cent of the total population. Locations in the fertile irrigated plains along the great rivers similarly help explain the rise of the dozens of great cities in the Islamic Middle East. Damascus, Baghdad, Samara, Fustat/Cairo were initially central seats of the army and administration, but grew to the dazzling dimensions of over 100,000 inhabitants. In the 920s and 930s, Northern Iran and Baghdad suffered unusually cold winter temperatures, which turned into a continuous pattern accompanied by drought in the 11th century into the 1230s. The persistent cold winters were affected by the Siberian high wind system and severely damaged the cotton plantations as well as various other crops such as dates, figs, and citrus trees. As a consequence of these climatic fluctuations, Baghdad was depopulated well before the Mongols’ conquest. However impressive the dimensions and activities of the Islamic cities really were, their development remained confined to the Mediterranean and subtropical climate zones. Their growth and prosperity rested on the combination of the: choice of a political and religious centre their favourable location on long-distance trade routes intensive commercialized agriculture attraction of highly skilled local crafts. In this respect, there are striking similarities with the cities in the urbanized areas of India and China; indeed, all pre-industrial cities concentrated economic, social, religious, and political powers. Yet the possibilities and capacities of massive resource extraction varied. The steady supply of huge quantities of rice and grain, and the possibilities of transporting and storing them created a formidable asset favouring the central state authorities in China. The sheer scale of such capacity provided the Chinese emperors with resources that clearly outran those of other contenders for power. Power systems elsewhere were more vulnerable; in India as a consequence of the highly variable climatic conditions; in the Islamic world because of the volatility of nomadic rulers imposing various taxes; and in Europe as a result of its small margins of surplus in the agrarian economy In fact, looking at Europe around the 10th and 11th centuries, we can single out: Constantinople Córdoba Granada as the only cases which were comparable in their size with the cities of the Middle East. Their importance was evidently derived from their status as capital cities located in exceptionally fertile regions and on strategic crossroads. In the cases of Andalusia, the cultural unity with the rest of the Arabic world facilitated overseas linkages. From the 11th century, however, northern and central Italy became unmistakably dominant, taking over from the earlier developed centres in the south such as Amalfi and Palermo. The second most densely urbanized area in Europe in this period was the southern Low Countries, in particular Flanders It was not until the 16th century that this concentration was surpassed by the cities of Brabant, especially by the growth of Antwerp, the first trading metropolis north of the Alps to pass the 100,000 threshold, and in the 17th century by Amsterdam. None of the largest European cities emerged because they were a political capital, they all grew thanks to their exceptionally favourable location on the overland trading routes and their maritime connections which secured their access to resources. Some of these towns, though, expanded because of their political connections. In the cases of London and Paris, economic location advantages supported their extraordinary size, to which their political ascendancy in a larger kingdom was added. Absorbing population surpluses from a very wide area, they became much larger than all other cities in the realm. VARYING POWER RELATIONS BETWEEN CITIES AND TERRITORIAL STATE The rise of a strong feudal power did not follow automatically from the available methods of resource extraction. For China, Victoria the Qin emerged victorious from the period of the ‘Warring States’ (475–221 BCE) thanks to new policies, the methods being partly copied from the ‘best practices’ of their competitors. Already in the 4th century BCE intensive farming was encouraged alongside multiple crops by large-scale irrigation projects and assistance with farm tools and technical advice. Population growth was stimulated by mandating marriage before the age of twenty and providing subsidies for families with more children. An improved system of household registration facilitated the levy of taxes. The administrative system, based upon meritocracy, was gradually extended into four layers which controlled production on the basis of annual reports, leading to rewards and sanctions. The ***Qin thus consolidated their conquests and expanded continually the degree of centralized resource extraction. Peasants were obliged to perform military service and public works as corvées. In the 1st century BCE, the Confucian philosophy laying a stress on service and loyalty to principle became the dominant imperial ideology; administrators regarded themselves henceforth as protectors of the people. Imperial capitals were built by each new dynasty as reflections of the cosmological order It is remarkable that the period of the Warring States coincided with a rising commercialization that permitted Chinese merchants to amass substantial resources thanks to new trade opportunities, not unlike merchants in late medieval Europe. But the rise of the Qin state stifled the tendency towards urban autonomy; the Qin rulers efficiently suppressed the merchant class by introducing a merchant registry that imposed heavy duties and restricted its mobility. The Han dynasty (202 BCE–189 CE) was less repressive and allowed the accumulation of merchant wealth, but strictly forbade merchants to show off any status symbols such as expensive clothing, carrying weapons, or riding horses, and excluded them from the administrative offices. The way in which the Chinese empire was built—by massive physical violence to extract huge material and human resources for its military, symbolic, and administrative purposes—prevented the emergence of the kind of autonomy that Weber considered to be essential in the European development. The Tang dynasty (618–907) favoured trading connections with the Turkish and Persian realms, permitting the settlements of Sogdian merchants in the northern capitals Chang’an and Luoyang; Sogdian temples emerged even near the market squares. They also established themselves in minor towns in the valley downstream of the Yellow River, where they could deal directly with the silk producers. Around 75- 55 per cent of state revenue consisted of duties on silk and hemp cloths, which demonstrates the connectedness between the empire and the Sogdian merchants. Also Arab and Persian merchants could establish themselves in the harbours of southern China. Under the Song dynasty (960–1279), the largest Chinese cities enjoyed a considerable degree of commercial freedom, not unlike under the Ming empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. In contrast to China, Europe’s population grew and its trade networks expanded at a time when no strong dynastic states existed. Agricultural commercialization occurred while feudal lords ruled through patrimonialism, not through meritocracy such as in China. While Chinese emperors, like the sultans in the Islamic world, could impose commercial taxes at will, and imposed state monopolies on the production of iron and weapons, salt, liquor, and tea, European rulers were unable to establish a monopoly of violence and most were bound to customary law that, at least in principle, protected even communities of serfs against arbitrary exploitation. The European feudal structure was more of a reciprocal kind; Magna Carta (1215) is a clear demonstration of the vassals’ power to resist transgressions by their feudal lord, even if he were the king. The feudal model was extended to a more general principle of public law, and also the city of London was explicitly included in the listed limitations to royal power. While resource extraction for Chinese warfare rested mainly upon the principle of coercion, European wars depended much more on the willingness of financial elites to cooperate with monarchs, thus on negotiation and bargaining. In addition, wars tended to be much more expensive in Europe (because of the hiring of mercenaries) than in China (conscripts) which strengthened this dependent relationship. From the 11th century, Europe’s rapidly growing towns protected their liberties against feudal assaults by the construction of defensive walls and by organizing militias. But the timing of commercialization, differences in state efficiency, feudal reciprocity, and more expensive European wars were not the only relevant factors. It is essential to take into account the secular structure of the Catholic Church, which enjoyed, in the tradition of the late Roman empire, the status of legal and fiscal immunity for its personnel and properties, and thus commanded yet another way of substantial resource extraction. For several centuries the Church was in fact the only sophisticated and stable power structure in Western Europe. Bishops effectively ruled most cities and their hinterland in Italy and in the empire. The Church expanded thanks to its reciprocal relationship with the holders of physical power, legitimizing their actions as holy wars spreading the true faith and sacral royal power, by which it could ideologically supersede its aristocratic contenders. In Europe, relative overpopulation drove the clerical and the aristocratic owners of large estates to concede greater personal freedom to the peasants who started the clearance of new arable land. Similarly, they had to give up their seigniorial rights over those who fled their domains and settled in emerging urban centres. From the 10th century onwards, old towns and cities saw their population grow, and new conglomerates emerged on crossroads along navigable rivers. Both the communities in newly founded agricultural domains and those in growing urban centres built up their own way of life, based on particular privileges and liberties, away from the servile status which had been the rule since the 3rd century. Personal freedom of the citizens a substantial degree of self-government a specific set of legal prescriptions protecting individual citizens as well as their property rights were typically characteristic privileges that were granted to rural and urban communes as a kind of ‘concession’ by local lords. Cases of total autonomy and independence of the communes were rare however, since the landed aristocracy remained well established and was on its way to creating ever larger power structures through expansion, elimination of weaker contenders, and concentration into territorial principalities and even kingdoms. External pressure and risks encouraged the earliest communes to create bonds of solidarity, formalized in sworn oaths. ‘Horizontal’ social relations, voluntarily agreed between people with comparable status, replaced the former model of ‘vertical’ dependency. Internal relations were ideally conceived as peaceful: visitors had to leave their weapons at the city gates, conflicts between citizens became regulated with restrictions on the use of physical violence. The 1114 urban privilege of Valenciennes was typically referred to as the ‘peace of the city’. Wherever the burghers felt strong enough, they bought off the limitations to their freedom from their local lord, often a bishop or an abbot. Those craftsmen living in old urban centres in a servile status as servants of the aristocracy came into a position to buy their freedom, as did the commune as a whole. It generally meant personal freedom for the citizens, the right to protect the community, the citizens, and their property by legal as well as by military means, local law-making and proper jurisdiction. Guilds and neighbourhood organizations enhanced the associative political culture, which was boosted further by common festivities and rituals. In Europe, alongside the nascent and centralizing territorial states, three different power structures emerged, each with its own logic, and each with independent capacities to extract resources and to control different means of power. The clergy mastered the means of persuasion and belief the aristocracy derived its status from the exercise of physical violence the citizens controlled the markets. The clergy and the aristocracy extracted rents and duties from their domains, while the accumulated mobile capital enabled the citizens to contract massive loans at rather low rates of interest. This differentiated setting permitted the formation of shifting alliances and coalitions. Coalitions between aristocrats, feudal landholders, and clergy prevailed in most countries with low degrees of urbanization, such as in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, while urban interests were usually better represented in areas that were densely urbanized. China’s various religious sects were superseded by the Confucian ideology that was firmly entrenched in the state apparatus; political opposition that was mingled with religious discontent always remained essentially local in character. In the areas in which Sunni Islam ruled, the local religious leaders (ulama) were dependent upon the state for their resources; state and religion constituted one inseparable whole, and no distinction existed between civil, feudal, and Islamic law. In the Ottoman empire, urban officials were all appointed by the sultan. The kadi, administrator and judge, had authority over the plurality of courts, Sunni, Christian, and Jewish. However, a different path was followed in Iran where the Safavids (1501–1722) introduced Shi’ite Islam. The clergy gained direct control over religious taxes that did not need to go through the hands of the government, which thus permitted the ulama to take independent and critical political positions. Through their own system of resource extraction Iran’s clergy commanded a strong urban network, organizing education and welfare which furthered alliances with all sorts of urban groupings, not unlike in Europe. The division between church and state in Iran thus resulted in a balance of power that could also act in favour of typically town-based interests. SECURING URBAN ECONOMIES Burgher= A burgher was a rank or title of a privileged citizen of medieval towns in. Burghers formed the pool from which city officials could be drawn, and their immediate families that formed the social class of the medieval. During the 10th to 13th centuries, European artisanal production and trade developed on a scale unseen in the earlier marketplaces. The urban way of life implied an indirect relation to agriculture, since most burghers were no longer producing their own food. Therefore, all cities and towns depended on the supply of food and raw materials from the countryside, which had to be paid for by artefacts of a higher quality than could normally be attained in the villages or domains. Only court cities, capitals, and bishop seats could rely on other, coercive-based streams of income, above all when they exercised direct political control over a larger area. The urban market was thus a node of connections which required security along the trading routes. Potentially, this made urban economies vulnerable to interference from external powers. The larger the city and the more sophisticated its production, the farther a city’s hinterland had to extend. For example, from the early 12th century London controlled the traffic 65 km upstream and 61 km downstream along the Thames, and thus also the markets on the tributaries north and south of the river. Merchants from Cologne effectively monopolized the traffic on the Rhine downstream to Dordrecht, especially for their most valuable staple product, wine. Ghent traders similarly monopolized the traffic on the city’s two rivers as far as the county’s boundaries, on the Leie and in both directions of the Scheldt, especially in order to maintain its staple market for grain. Smaller towns were restricted in their development by the monopolistic tendencies of the better located ones, which, as a consequence, had more opportunities for further growth. The most directly concerned were merchants dealing with long-distance trade, who often created forms of self-organization to protect each other on the basis of reciprocal solidarity, travelling in convoy, and negotiating with local authorities. Such merchants’ guilds and hanses reduced risks, functioned on mutual trust, and thus lowered transaction costs. Since the merchants were the most prominent members of the economic elite in the early urban centres, it will not come as a surprise that they effectively took over the government of the growing cities. There can be no doubt that they did so out of well-understood self-interest, resulting often in an outright abuse of their monopoly of entrepreneurial, commercial, political, and judiciary powers within the cities up to the 14th century. The internal power relations in cities depended on their economic structure and population size. In the case of the largest industrial and commercial centres, revolts broke out from the 13th century onwards among the hundreds or, in some cases like Florence and Ghent, thousands of artisans working in the textile industry which was particularly sensitive to international disruptions. In a substantial number of towns these tensions led to a higher degree of political participation and self-organization of the crafts. The governments of the larger cities became thus less exclusively dominated by the old patrician clans and had to open their ranks to newcomers from the middle classes and even master craftsmen, which implied that a functional differentiation needed to be made between the public power and the merchants’ guild. The commune could still stand for the egalitarian rights of all citizens, but the elites of entrepreneurs and great merchants usually followed their own logic of capitalistic profitmaximizing. The immediate countryside could be subjected to market regulations, staple duties, guild monopolies, and capital investments with fiscal and judicial privileges for the urban owners who required deliverables in the form of products, rents, and tributes. In extreme cases, and in the absence of mighty sovereign rulers, as in central and northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, this supremacy tended towards the formation of city-states dominated by the largest city in the region. In this context, the dominant cities acted not fundamentally differently from feudal lords competing for the territorial control of resources, except that they showed greater respect for local privileges, economic interests, and self-governance. Private initiative for self-organization remained the main option for the security en route. Maritime insurance was the hallmark of the Genoese traders, in combination with the spreading of risks over a number of partnerships. Venice created a unique solution by the organization and protection of the commercial fleets by the state itself. Along the Atlantic, North Sea, and Baltic coasts, the protection of trade rested on a combination of free enterprise and reliance on the intervention of the communal or monarchical authorities in support of their citizens abroad. Negotiation, retaliation, boycott, and, if unavoidable, commercial war were the typical instruments for solving conflicts between trading partners belonging to different realms and jurisdictions. The German Hanse is the most extended case (among many others) of this private–public combination, and its transition, in 1358, from an organization of merchants’ guilds to one of the commercial cities’ governments, also clearly marks the distinction we made earlier between merchants’ organizations and urban governments. A novelty for Europe was the establishment of companies for colonial trade, a most sophisticated combination of private organization and protection of commercial interests under the license of central authorities. The extraction of resources through this amalgam of urban capitalist and state coercive powers varied considerably in substance though. The Spanish and Portuguese companies yielded funds above all for the state, while only a limited number of merchants profited. Colonial companies of the Netherlands and Great Britain, in contrast, were essentially enterprises that were under the control of the merchants themselves. The institutions of the Dutch East India Company reflected the federated structure of the Republic with its extraordinarily high degree of urban autonomy. Six boards all located in different cities, fitted out the ships; shares were sold to a substantial number of investors; the earnings went to the separate, local merchant elites. The English East India Company was likewise run by merchants themselves; its shares were traded on the market and the profits were likewise destined for the participants, although the proceeds were regularly milked for loans to the government. The company was not bound by autonomous urban institutions like the Dutch, but constituted a much more national organization in which above all London-based merchants profited. Outside Europe such powerful companies for long-distance trade did not emerge. Nevertheless, on a smaller scale, elsewhere too merchant associations and guilds protected and promoted the trade of their members, reduced transaction costs through the creation of trust, while solidarity was strengthened through common (religious) rituals and festivities. The Chinese common-trade and native-place organizations operated with a surprisingly high degree of self-governance. Mediation in merchant disputes constituted an important role of these guilds. But such organizations had to do without the charters that secured the independent and corporate structure of their European counterparts, implying the danger of sudden state interference. In 1219 the Chinese Southern Song dynasty issued the regulation prescribing that the cost of luxury imports should be paid in silk, brocades, and porcelain, in order to prevent the outflow of silver. Yet state policies did not only curb trade. In particular the lifting of maritime trade prohibitions in 1684 resulted in a rise of commercial activity in Qing China which stimulated the growth of new guilds and associations. Another period of unrestricted commercial competition was noticeable in the later 19th century, which even permitted the occasional emergence of a financial guild that assumed the basic function of a central bank, contributing to the stabilization of the local market and serving the needs of interregional and long-distance trade. Likewise in the Ottoman empire the guilds’ degree of self-governance varied. While most guilds had started out as voluntary associations, not only regulating trade and production but also providing mutual support in case of sickness and death, many came to serve as administrative links between the local government and the workshops, with guilds receiving instructions from the authorities. Control from above was greatest in Istanbul, but less in provincial towns like Damascus and Seres; likewise silk weavers had to deal with regular incursions from the local authorities, since silk occupied a central position in foreign trade, while guilds of shoemakers and tanners were usually left alone. Thus both in the Ottoman and Chinese empires merchants and artisans constituted comparable organizations for trade and production, but the range of their activities depended strongly upon the (temporary) room for manoeuvre granted by the contemporary central and local authorities, while European traders could rely upon traditions and constitutions that continued to serve as a base for power and negotiations. THE URBAN-BASED DEMAND FOR POLITICAL REPRESENTATION European cities and even smaller towns were entitled to negotiate with all other public authorities and private associations, within as well as outside the boundaries of the realm to which they belonged, in order to protect their citizens by legal means, even beyond the walls. In 15th-century Flanders, Brabant, and Holland urban delegations negotiated on their own behalf with representatives of the German Hanse, and the kings of England and Castile. When their commercial interests conflicted with those of the monarch, the parties would negotiate to find a compromise, and the monarch mostly understood that their citizens’ income was the basis for his tax revenues. The legal personality of the European cities helped them to oppose arbitrary treatment by state rulers. They did so by referring to the privileges granted them on various occasions and by guaranteeing their citizens’ security and property rights. This mattered especially with regard to commercial capital which represented an independent strategic asset in interstate relations. At the basis of European urban power stood a distinct civil administration, with a separate budget and usually also with considerable fiscal autonomy, specific to a particular town. Outside Europe county administrations often overlapped with those of the towns; county borders could run right through the middle of a town. No local fiscal autonomy existed. Yet in the Chinese and Islamic realms informal forms of urban governance existed in which local notables advised and supported government officials. The relation between these ‘notables’ and the state was of a fluid character; when the state was strong the local notables operated as agents of the government, but in times of weakening government or crisis they acted with a substantial degree of autonomy. Geographical distance constituted another factor. In the Ottoman empire Istanbul was undoubtedly the most controlled town of all, but the central authorities had far less impact on distant provincial capitals like Algiers and Tunis. Such local intermediaries usually looked after the interests of their communities and could ask for a lowering of taxation or other privileges. In Japan, the merchant dominated town of Sakai (near Osaka) was even reported to govern itself as an independent unit in the 15th and 16th centuries. Next to these informal urban administrations there were neighbourhood associations. Such organizations took up various tasks, such as combating crime and fires, disposal of garbage, mediation in conflicts, assisting in taxation, supporting local religious cults (in China and Japan in particular), mutual aid because of sickness and death, and defence in times of war. Again, these local associations were self-governing to a varying degree, usually depending upon the distance from the central power. In Edo, for example, the shogun-government exerted a strict control through the appointment of the neighbourhood chiefs, thus reducing the independent nature of local government. In fact, both the Islamic and the Chinese states left much of the actual urban administration to the non-state sector, which permitted local elites and their associations to govern the daily routine have social power and influence independent of the ruler reinforce a separate urban identity and pride. Yet no legal instruments existed to defend the citizens, and since the local notables cooperated closely with the regime through highly personalized networks, the development of an outspoken and independent middle class was hindered. Economic power was not so easily translated into political power as in Europe. The accumulation of capital resources in towns always stood under threat since the legal systems of the Islamic and Chinese worlds did not develop mechanisms to provide security against business risks or arbitrary taxation and confiscation. No powerful buffer existed that restricted ad hoc exactions and unexpected taxes and surcharges by the central government; no urban refuge was present to protect entrepreneurs and traders against the arbitrariness of over-ambitious princes. In China salt merchants amassed considerable fortunes, yet they occupied some sort of intermediary position between state and the business community, not unlike the powerful tax farmers of the French ancien régime; they were even called ‘official merchants’. For most Chinese merchants, the best route to political power was to buy land and join the gentry, and then to have their sons educated in order to have them try to secure a post as an imperial official. In the Islamic world the continuity of merchant-based wealth was further hindered because of inheritance patterns that tended to fragment the accumulated capital, while economic partnerships stood under regular threat of being dissolved after the withdrawal, incapacity, or death of a partner. The rise of unified dynastic states wore down the typical European urban autonomy, a direct result of the economies of scale that allowed territorial rulers the use of superior military techniques and an ever increasing number of troops. New generations of emperors and kings imposed greater fiscal pressures on urban communities; while former privileges continued, new regulations and new administrative networks broke more and more into the existing systems of self-government. The decline of urban autonomy varied though throughout Europe. Leading commercial cities typically maintained a fair level of autonomy, as long as the monarch profited from their services but did not exhaust them financially. When these elites shifted toward a rent-seeking and economically less dynamic attitude, they paved the way for the dominance of the dynastic states. While Dutch towns maintained their autonomous status right up to the end of the 18th century, in the Mediterranean region urban self-government virtually disappeared, with the notable exception of Venice. Numerous German, Flemish, and Brabant towns managed to preserve a self-governing status, yet they had to pay increasingly high prices in the form of taxation or loans for it. In any case, they lost the opportunity to defend the particular interests of their citizens beyond their own walls. Some compensation was found in the share of state taxation the local elites could keep for themselves. Despite this growing power of the state, even state-controlled towns contained areas that escaped direct intervention from above. All over the world marketplaces, public houses, coffeehouses, and teahouses constituted a ‘public sphere’ that permitted easy and rapid communication with the potential of formulating critical opinions regarding government policies. In the Islamic world the mosque acted as the main outdoor meeting place in the city. The religious endowments held by charitable trusts further extended the infrastructure of social interaction within towns, among other ways through the establishment of inns. The fact that Islamic and Chinese state rulers adopted a kind of laissez-faire policy toward local government and management permitted local notables and associations to discuss political issues. Indeed, the state simply did not have the capacity to control all and everything. The independent treasures of the rich Chinese merchant associations did not only serve philanthropic purposes; they also sponsored festivals and performances, and endowed teahouses and public gardens that became important social centres. The teahouses even acted as a kind of public court; Chinese often preferred the arbitration of the teahouse mediators to the justice of the local government. These social spaces permitted all kinds of debate, yet most disputes were restricted to local issues and managerial topics. According to Habermas, the ‘public sphere’ in early modern Western Europe constituted something new, with the emergence of a more open, also nationwide political debate, with the appearance of all kind of newspapers and immense numbers of pamphlets in the Dutch Republic, England, and France. European public houses did differ from Chinese teahouses or social meeting places funded by Islamic waqfs. Chinese teahouses had to carry a public notice on the wall that warned the people not to talk about national affairs, and were often closed in times of crises. The organizations funded by waqfs had the disadvantage that the operating rules were fixed from the time of the endowments, and thus they could not adapt to new circumstances. The English and Dutch public spheres, moreover, contained a specific high political ingredient by tradition. Urban autonomy in England itself had always varied considerably from place to place, and the fiscal autonomy had always been much lower compared to the Continent, but in numerous municipal corporations the representatives were chosen through free elections. These elections became true community events in the 18th century; as such, they were unknown in continental Europe before the French Revolution. Even though the electorate was not always very large, and access to the English public sphere was not as open as is often assumed, the impact of this urban-based tradition regarding new notions of wider political participation cannot be doubted. Gradually, such ideals regarding citizen rights and parliamentary representation also spread to other parts of Europe and beyond. Within China the public sphere gained momentum after the establishment of chambers of commerce in the later 19th century. The members of these elite bodies were drawn from the former guilds and merchants’ associations, and were able to put considerable pressure upon the government and resisted arbitrary taxation. The chambers of commerce were seedbeds of a new kind of political consciousness, which was furthered even more by the appearance of the first major Chinese language newspaper in 1872 CONCLUSIONS Due to ecological factors European cities were, on a global scale, late to develop and relatively small. In the 10th to 13th centuries steady economic and demographic growth facilitated the expansion of ecclesiastical institutions in Europe, as well as that of seigniorial lordships and that of the most successful competitors among them, the territorial princes. It was in this triangular context of partly competing and partly complementary power structures of the Church, the aristocracy and the territorial princes, that towns emerged and grew into a new competitor for power, based on a fundamentally different system of resource extraction. Thanks to the typical European balance of power these urban communes were recognized as legal and political entities which could be represented as a collective in confrontation with monarchical, ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and even external interests. Their voice needed to be taken into account given their control over substantial commercial capital. At an earlier stage and more rapidly than in Europe, the balance of power in the Islamic and Chinese worlds had gravitated towards the central ruler, which precluded the development of autonomous urban communities Yet everywhere townsmen associated and could profit from the temporary weakening of central rule, above all in the more peripheral areas of the realm. Since the actual local administration was a rather weakly defined field both in China and the Islamic states, local notables had the opportunity to fill this gap, and established urban councils, merchant associations, guilds, and neighbourhood organizations. Through such institutions urban notables furthered their interests and those of their community, although the degree of success was usually lower and less persistent than in Europe since strong legal protective instruments and property rights were lacking. Yet the strength of these European urban institutions could also result in exclusions; Jews and other non-Christians were only half-heartedly tolerated. In comparison, Chinese and Islamic cities were more tolerant and often included settlements of foreign merchants belonging to other religions, at least during the Middle Ages. By and large, urban self-governance and the typical urban-based public sphere can be viewed as phenomena that appeared on a variable scale within Europe itself. Their role, and that of the urban component in them, depended on changing power bases. For the towns: these mainly involved their population size their economic and financial prosperity their communication facilities their prerogatives in administrative economic, fiscal, and judicial matters their military force. For thousands of small towns in thinly populated regions, the domination of Church, landlords, and princes prevailed until deep into the 19th century. Even in many regions in the more densely urbanized West, urban autonomy was worn down during the 17th and 18th centuries. Cities lost their capacity to rule beyond their walls, but their most enterprising citizens organized themselves in corporations and companies which reached out over the whole world. Yet old rights and constituencies proved strong, and strengthened the development of new, radical demands for political representation in the later 18th century. Such developments were not unknown outside Europe either, although the obstacles toward a wider participation of power were usually of a more obstinate kind. But both in the East and the West, these political demands emanated from a typical urban-based public sphere that had strong roots in the past.