Population and Migration in World History (CITIES IN WORLD HISTORY CH 8) PDF

POPULATION AND MIGRATION IT is extremely difficult to gauge the demographic dimensions of urbanism in Europe, North Africa, and Asia between 3500 BCE and 500 CE. One obvious reason for this is that the term ‘city’ can be used to denote completely different phenomena. During most periods of Chinese h...

POPULATION AND MIGRATION IT is extremely difficult to gauge the demographic dimensions of urbanism in Europe, North Africa, and Asia between 3500 BCE and 500 CE. One obvious reason for this is that the term ‘city’ can be used to denote completely different phenomena. During most periods of Chinese history the presence of an outer wall was seen as a distinguishing feature of ‘cities’ but if we use this definition even some very small settlements qualify as ‘urban’. In Classical Greece all agglomerations which were centres of self-governing ‘city-states’ can be regarded as ‘cities’, regardless of their size. Most of these centres were walled, but the basic criterion which sets them apart from other types of settlement remains political and administrative On the practical front any attempt at quantification runs up against the difficulty that the written sources contain very few reliable population figures. This means that those interested in the size of the populations of early cities have to rely on a variety of indications supplied by archaeology. However, as we shall presently see, the archaeological data have been claimed to be compatible with a wide range of population estimates. MESOPOTAMIA In the Near East the beginning of town life can be traced back all the way to Jericho in Palestine (c.8000 BCE) and to Çatal Höyük in Turkey (c.7000–5000 BCE). Nevertheless, the emergence of a recognizably ‘urban’ civilization across larger geographical areas seems not to have started before 4000 BCE. Some spectacular examples of this development are to be found in South Mesopotamia. Here the settlement of Uruk expanded from c.70 hectares in about 3600 BCE to c.100 hectares in around 3200 BCE. During the Early Dynastic Period (2900–2500 BCE) Uruk went on to expand to c.250 hectares. It remains difficult to use any of these figure as a basis for population estimates. However, these figures refer to the number of inhabitants per hectare of domestic space. According to most specialists only about one-third of the built-up areas of the cities of Early Mesopotamia was occupied by houses. On this basis it has been suggested that Early-Dynastic Uruk may have had between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. Where did the populations of these fast-growing cities come from? In the case of Uruk it has been suggested that the growth of the city cannot be explained unless we assume a ‘mass movement of the rural population into the south into the Uruk area’. It seems, however, likely that we are also looking at a process of sedentarization in which large. numbers of semi-nomadic people became farmers and took up residence in towns Another important question is why a large proportion of the population of South Mesopotamia opted for urban residence. One possible explanation is that the 4th and early 3rd millennia BCE witnessed an increase in competition for vitally important resources (mainly land and water) and this resulted in a low level of rural security. It might also be speculated that in the specific context of pre-dynastic and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia taking up urban residence was seen as an effective way of expressing or claiming membership of the political, religious, social, and economic community of the early citystate. In the absence of any direct evidence for urban fertility and mortality rates, little can be said about the demographic dynamics of the cities of Mesopotamia. However, since domestic quarters were tightly packed and were poorly drained, we can be reasonably sure that large sections of the urban population lived in insalubrious conditions and suffered from a high mortality rate. In all likelihood constant immigration from rural areas was needed to sustain the populations of these cities These immigrants belonged to a motley group of previously semi-nomadic tribes which had originally lived to the west of the Euphrates. In the course of time a considerable number of people (including kings) with Amoritic names begin to be found in major cities, such as Babylon and Sippar. This suggests that immigrant populations were not immune to the pull exercised by the large urban agglomerations of southern Mesopotamia In the time of the Neo-Babylonian empire (626–539 BCE) Babylon became the largest city of Mesopotamia. Its outer wall enclosed an area of no fewer than 890 hectares but it is generally agreed that the majority of the urban population lived within the 400 to 500 hectares enclosed by the inner wall circuit. Even this area may not have been entirely built up. Again the number of inhabitants cannot be determined but the majority view is that Babylon is unlikely to have had more than 50,000 inhabitants during the 6th century BCE. Unfortunately, little is known about the ethnic make-up of the population of 6th-century Babylon. Most of the Jews deported after the capture of Jerusalem (586 BCE) seem to have ended up in villages rather than in cities, but finds of seals bearing Jewish names suggest the presence of deportees or their descendants in the city. This clue might be taken to suggest that settlement of involuntary migrants in rural areas was followed by a secondary phase of voluntary migration to the city. ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL GREECE AND THE HELLENISTIC WORLD The early decades of the Archaic Period (750–500 BCE) witnessed the rise of the ‘city-state’ (polis) in many parts of mainland Greece, on the Greek islands, and on the west coast of Asia Minor. With the notable exception of Sparta, where a large proportion of the adult male citizen population lived in army tents, all of the city-states which emerged during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE had a recognizably urban centre. It remains extremely difficult to assess the amount of rural–urban migration implied by the appearance of these towns. Stories about new poleis being created by a decision to ‘live together’ (synoikismos) might be taken to suggest a partial abandonment of rural settlements in favour of a single political centre. Yet it is notoriously difficult to find archaeological evidence for widespread rural abandonment Perhaps the best argument in favour of the view that some degree of clustering must have occurred is the size of the urbanized polis centres of classical times. As recent investigations into the size and populations of the Greek cities of the 5th and 4th centuries have demonstrated, the size of the areas enclosed by the city walls of classical times implies the existence of a large urban population even if it is assumed that only between onethird and one-half of the walled area was used for habitation. Since assigning large populations to town and country would necessarily produce an absurdly large total population, the conclusion that at least 60 per cent of the population of the Greek world must have lived in cities cannot be avoided Needless to say, the implication is not that 60 per cent of the Greek population was primarily engaged in non-agricultural occupations. The correct conclusion is rather that a very large proportion of the farming population of Classical Greece preferred to live in cities. The resulting picture is intriguingly similar to that which emerges from the archaeological evidence from Early Dynastic Mesopotamia The Archaic Age also witnessed the emigration of large numbers of Greeks to colonies in Italy, Sicily, Cyrenaica (modern Libya), and the Black Sea region. The cities and citystates which emerged from this process strongly resembled those of the Greek mainland and western Asia Minor On the Greek mainland Athens is by far the best documented polis. Based on the number of hoplites which the Athenians could field at the start of the Peloponnesian War, it has been calculated that at this time Attica had a population of about 250,000. This estimate includes resident foreigners and slaves. The most recent estimates for the populations of Athens and the Piraeus are 35,000 to 40,000 and 30,000 respectively. All these estimates come with a large margin of error. Nonetheless it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Attica was characterized by a much lower urbanization rate than the average Greek polis. The obvious explanation is that Athens had a much larger rural territory than most other Greek cities. It has long been realized that population movements within Attica can be traced with the help of funerary inscriptions. Membership of the urban and rural localities (dêmoi) had become hereditary. This means that any citizen who died after moving from a rural locality to Athens or the Piraeus was commemorated as still belonging to his place of origin. Using this type of evidence it can be shown that about 60 per cent of those citizens who received an inscribed gravestone in Athens, the Piraeus, or the urbanized districts along the south coast of Attica belonged to one of the rural demes. Either the recipients of these stones or one of their ancestors must have moved from the country to the city. Interestingly, a completely different picture emerges from a series of 4th-century documents concerning the successful filing of manumission suits by slaves. Since the information provided by these texts includes demotics for citizen owners and place of residence for metic owners and for manumitted slaves, it is possible to establish how many exslaves lived in a deme different from the deme of origin or the place of residence of their former owners. In about 85 per cent of all cases the owner’s demotic is different from the slave’s place of residence, and the vast majority of the ex-slaves mentioned in these texts appear to have resided in or immediately outside the city of Athens. From these data it has plausibly been inferred that the majority of ex-slaves drifted to Athens and the Piraeus, for the obvious reason that the opportunities to pursue a trade or a commercial enterprise in other parts of Attica were negligible. In Hellenistic times many new cities of the Greek type were founded in various parts of what had been the Persian empire. In many of the new cities founded by Alexander and his immediate successors groups of veterans formed the core of the population. A handful of cities is known to have received a significant number of civilian immigrants As in the case of Antioch immigrants from Greece and their descendants made up a large proportion of Alexandria’s population. Interestingly, we happen to know that Alexandria also had an Egyptian and a Jewish quarter. The existence of these quarters proves that the city attracted large numbers of native Egyptians and immigrants from neighbouring regions. ROMAN ITALY AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE As the Romans conquered Italy, one of the techniques they used to consolidate their grip on newly subjugated territories was the creation of ‘Latin’ colonies whose populations did not have Roman citizenship. Each Latin colony had a walled urban centre which must have performed a variety of administrative, religious, and undoubtedly also economic functions for the rural population Even if we make allowance for the fact that some Latin colonies were established in existing towns, it cannot be denied that Roman colonial policies resulted in the spread of Romanstyle urbanism across large parts of Italy. From the viewpoint of migration history it is interesting that this result was achieved through state-sponsored rather than through voluntary migration. This is not to deny that voluntary migration to newly conquered areas occurred, but the almost complete absence of evidence makes it impossible to assess its importance. Judging from the written sources, voluntary migration played an important part in the growth of Rome. We are told, for instance, that some 12,000 migrants of Latin status had moved to Rome between 203 BCE and 187 BCE Unfortunately, almost nothing is known about migrant networks or about other arrangements which would have made it easier for migrants to obtain access to housing, food, and work. Some foreigners who came to Puteoli, Ostia, or Rome for business purposes must have benefited from the existence of associations and offices of merchants originating from particular cities or regions, and it has plausibly been suggested that the existence of certain diaspora communities, such as the Jews, made it easier for people of the same background to move around the empire. However, as David Noy has acutely observed, there is no unambiguous evidence for any concentration of individual nationalities anywhere in the city of Rome. While the fast expansion of Rome during the last two centuries BCE cannot be explained without assuming high levels of voluntary and forced migration, the role of migration in sustaining the very large population created by these processes is more controversial. According to one study, demographic conditions in Rome are likely to have resembled those in 18th-century London where the difference between the crude death rate and the crude birth rate was about 10 per thousand per annum. On this view about 10,000 voluntary or forced migrants were needed to sustain the population of c.1 million which Rome is believed to have had during the 1st century CE Against this theory various scholars have argued that sanitary conditions in early imperial Rome were more salubrious than those existing in the large cities of early modern Europe. This counter-argument is unconvincing. It has been shown, for instance, that the dates of death mentioned in early Christian epitaphs from Rome show a strong concentration of deaths in late summer and early autumn which is best understood as reflecting the deadly impact of falciparian malaria and its interaction with other seasonal infections. On balance it remains difficult to avoid the conclusion that the city of Rome had a demographic regime similar to that of many other large cities of pre-industrial Europe and that a fairly high level of immigration was needed to sustain its population. After the transition from republic to empire large numbers of veterans continued to be settled in or near existing or newly founded cities in the frontier regions. In this period the Roman army numbered some 300,000 men and consisted of two components: citizens who had been recruited for service in the legions and non-citizens who served as auxiliaries and obtained citizenship after completing twenty-five years of service. Since during the 1st century CE most people of citizen status lived in Mediterranean Europe and because most auxiliaries were stationed outside the areas where they had been recruited, the composition of the early imperial army implies a high level of interregional migration Those who survived their twenty-five years of service often stayed in the province where they had served and were settled in civilian settlements which were set up as or developed into colonies. Most of these newly established cities had rigidly orthogonal street grids and had a strongly Roman appearance. However, while the moving around of soldiers by the state and the settlement of veterans played a crucial part in the growth of many cities in the frontier regions, the vast majority of the cities of the Roman empire seem to have grown as a result of local or regional processes of migration and as a result of elite expenditure on urban slaves CHINA Recent research suggests that the beginnings of Chinese urbanism can be traced back even earlier than the Neolithic period (3500–2600 BCE) when ‘proto-cities’ of modest dimensions started to develop in various parts of north-east China Larger cities began to develop in the Longshan period (2600–2000 BCE) which saw the emergence of sovereign states. The capital cities of these city-states typically covered between 20 and 35 hectares, although some larger agglomerations have been discovered After the collapse of Erlitou, in the time of the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE), Zhengzhou, the centre of the Erligang culture, grew into a fortified city of no fewer than 2,500 hectares with an inner enclosed core of 300 hectares. According to one estimate this city might have had as many as 100,000 inhabitants The tradition of building very large capital cities continued in the period of the Zhou dynasty (1046–403 BCE). The capital cities of this period included Zhongzhou (49 km2 ) and Chengzhou (near Luoyang; 15 km2 ). From the 7th century BCE the breaking down of the effective overlordship of the Zhou king paved the way for the emergence of regional territorial states, each of which had its own capital city. This pattern continued into the Warring States period (403–221 BCE) in which regional rulers ceased to pay nominal allegiance to the kings of Zhou The largest city of the Warring States period was Linzi, the capital of Qi (on the Shandong peninsula) which covered an area of about 15 km2 . Linzi is an interesting case because it is the first Chinese city for which a population estimate can be derived from the written sources which report that it was home to 70,000 households. With four people per household this would imply a population of c.280,000. However, since the size of the residential area was only 300 hectares, a population figure of this order would imply a population density of more than 900 persons per hectare of domestic space.20 This seems impossibly high. The only possible conclusion is that the figure of 70,000 households is either unreliable or should be taken to refer to the population of a much larger area Very little is known about the role of migration in creating the large cities of early Chinese history and in maintaining their populations. One of the few certainties in this area is that forced migration played an important part in the growth of at least some major cities. We are told, for instance, that after defeating his last opponents in 221 BCE, the Qin emperor Shi Huangdi deported 120,000 wealthy families from all over the empire and resettled them in the area of Xianjiang, the capital of Qin. Not much later, in the early years of the Han dynasty, some 50,000 people were resettled in or near the city of Chengdu. Similarly, the city of Chang’an had large suburbs for housing rich families resettled from the rest of the country. As these examples show, a large proportion of these forced migrants were settled in the administrative districts controlled by these cities rather than within the city walls. Nonetheless there can be no doubt that the fast expansion of Chengdu and Chang’an could not have taken place without a large influx of forced migrants. Occasionally we also hear of unfree migrants being moved to a capital city. One illustration of this is Sima Qian’s account of the expansion of Chang’an in the early years of the emperor Wudi (141–87 BCE): ‘The government offices became increasingly confused in function and were set up in greater and greater numbers, while the number of slaves moved from the provinces to the capital was so large that only by transporting 4 million piculs of grain up from the lower reaches of the Yellow River and adding to it the grain bought by the officials was the capital able to keep itself adequately supplied.’ Even rarer are references to voluntary migrants. Yet there can be no doubt that this type of migration occurred. In another passage also dealing with the city of Chang’an Sima Qian writes: ‘People poured in from all parts of the empire to congregate in the towns established at the imperial tombs around Chang’an, converging on the capital like the spokes of a wheel. The land area is small and the population numerous and therefore the people have become more and more sophisticated and crafty and have turned to secondary occupations such as trade to make their living Far more is known about migration to the frontier regions. Using detailed information supplied by newly discovered wood and bamboo records, a study by Chun-Su Chang discusses the settlement of various types of migrants in the newly conquered region of Ho-shi in the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BCE. After this area had been conquered by the emperor Wudi, tens of thousands of colonists moved in. These included regular garrison soldiers as well as large numbers of convicts. Most of these immigrants were settled as farmer-soldiers. However, after a couple of decades the largest fortresses became more civilian in character and developed into district capitals. Judging from the archaeological record, most of these cities remained quite smal SOUTH ASIA The history of urbanism in South Asia starts around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE with the appearance of four or five large cities of which Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are the most famous (see above Ch. 5). Attempts to estimate the populations of these cities run up against the usual methodological difficulties. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa seem to have covered between 100 to 200 hectares and 80 to 150 hectares respectively. For Mohenjo-daro a population in the order of 40,000 has been suggested, but since it is impossible to ascertain what proportion of the city was used for habitation the basis for this estimate is weak Unfortunately, the patchy archaeological record offers no basis for even a very approximate estimate of the number of Indian cities in early historical times. What is also extremely worrying is that estimates of the size of the population of the Mauryan empire (which covered most of India) vary from 15.5 million to a staggering 181 million. For both these reasons any attempt to calculate or estimate local, regional, or empire-wide urbanization rates seems doomed to fail One of the few certainties is that the phase of urban expansion which seems to have started in the 6th century BCE coincided with a period of general demographic expansion, but the exact relationship between these two phenomena remains disputed. Was population growth the prime mover which made possible urbanization? Did the emergence of states and cities stimulate demographic growth by promoting security? Or were the processes of state formation, urban expansion, and population growth simply inextricably intertwined? Judging from the archaeological record the cities of early historical India expanded at a faster rate than rural agglomerations.27 To some extent this differential growth rate can be explained as an optical illusion created by deficiencies in the rural data. Nonetheless it seems a safe inference that the simultaneous expansion of a large number of cities could not have happened without a significant level of rural–urban migration. It also seems likely that after the initial phase of urban expansion a certain level of migration from rural areas to cities was needed to prevent the large populations of cities like Pataliputra and Kausambi from declining. It must, however, be admitted that there is no concrete evidence to back up these inferences CONCLUSION As we have seen, city size and migration to cities in the period 3000 BCE–500 CE are difficult topics. Nonetheless it seems clear that in Mesopotomia and Classical Greece, and perhaps also in the Mauryan empire, even the largest cities typically had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. Some of the capital cities of the Hellenistic world seem to have had larger populations and in Han China the city of Chang’an may have had as many as 200,000 inhabitants; but in the period covered by this chapter only the population of early imperial Rome grew to about 1 million. In many pre-modern states state-sponsored migration to colonies established in newly conquered areas was a major factor in the expansion of urban networks. At the same time there is evidence to suggest that the forced migration of war captives and slaves played an important part in the growth of many early cities. In view of the high urban mortality rates caused by insalubrious living conditions it is likely that the populations of large and densely populated cities could not be sustained without continuous immigration. The literary and archaeological evidence supports this inference, but unfortunately does not permit a detailed analysis of underlying migration patterns. Words Demotic - denoting or relating to the kind of language used by ordinary people; colloquial. Manumission - release from slavery. Metic - a foreigner living in an ancient Greek city who had some of the privileges of citizenship. Deme - a political division of Attica in ancient Greece.