Power and Citizenship: Cities in World History PDF

POWER AND CITIZENSHIP The relations between the structures of power and those of citizenship have long been linked to, and influenced by, the opposition of East versus West. Now that such an opposition is considered as outdated and distorting, we have to look for more objective factors in order to d...

POWER AND CITIZENSHIP The relations between the structures of power and those of citizenship have long been linked to, and influenced by, the opposition of East versus West. Now that such an opposition is considered as outdated and distorting, we have to look for more objective factors in order to differentiate in time and space the long millennia of ‘Antiquity’ (c.3000 BCE to 500 CE). We have therefore to start with the history of studies, to eventually pass to a comparative description of the urban institutions as they are presently conceived, and finally to a description of the effects of the changing institutional features upon the physical form of the city. THE ‘IDEOLOGICAL’ MODELS Apart from the urban exposures of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the visible remains of the Hellenistic and Roman cities in Asia Minor and North Africa provided the image of true urban settlements. On the contrary, the Oriental civilizations were only known from isolated palaces(Persepolis) or temples (Egypt). True urban excavations started only in the mid-19th century in Greece and in Mesopotamia, while we had to wait another century to have comparable activities in India and in China. The Oriental cities were something else, be they the Assyrian ‘military encampments’, or the Egyptian ‘temple-cities’. The evaluation of the urban structure of the cities was just a consequence of the different evaluation of their socio-political institutions. The Western city being the seat of collective bodies (with the king located in extra-urban castles or residences), of political freedom, of democracy, of economic enterprise, the Oriental city had to be characterized by the negative values of despotism, of generalized servitude, of economic dirigisme and redistribution. The ‘East vs. West’ syndrome, revived by the Greek war of independence of 1822–1830, was easily applied to the evaluation of the urban settlements—both the modern ones in the Ottoman empire or in China, and the ancient ones being progressively brought to light in the Near East. The dichotomy would last an entire century, and its culmination can be identified in the works of Max Weber, since his Agrargeschichte (1909) providing two separate lanes for the progress of the Western city (from aristocratic to democratic polis) and of the Oriental royal palace (bureaucratic kingdom-city), and until his essay Die Stadt (1921) using Oriental cases (Israel, Islam, China, and Japan) to conclude that they lack the necessary requisites: they are not communities of citizens they lack the very idea of citizenship. He even classified the Western city under the heading of ‘illegitimate power’, to underscore its opposition to the seat of the political power. It also happened—most scholars being European and dealing with modern history—that the specific trajectory of the European city from the Middle Ages to the modern industrial city, with insistence on the commercial origins and on the communal (anti-monarchic) attitude, was perceived as a normal paradigm to be extended back to previous history, and to non-European civilizations. TOWARDS A PROPERLY UNIVERSAL MODEL In the meantime, during the colonial occupation of the Near East and of India, archaeology discovered many cities all over the world and realized that Oriental civilizations and Oriental cities were so diversified in time and space that the traditional contraposition of East vs. West was untenable. Also in Europe, the growing interest in the Celtic and German cultures expanded the realm of cities well beyond the Classical (Mediterranean) scenery, and diversified their appearance. Also the uniqueness of the European and Near Eastern trajectory was challenged by the awareness of other trajectories in Asia and in the New World. Finally, the universality of the Greek model was challenged even inside the Greek world by taking into account the non-Athenian, non-democratic polities (kingdoms and ethnic states) that were prevalent also there. The search for unbiased criteria for identifying cities (as opposed to villages) culminated in Gordon Childe’s article on The Urban Revolution (1950). His ‘ten points’ have been criticized (and misunderstood) by later scholars, but still keep the merit of being archaeologically testable, and of being potentially universal in application. The search for the origin of cities, where the ‘original characters’ of urbanizationcould be outlined in a simplified and evident way, had to admit at least three different locations: Mesopotamia (plus Egypt) China Mesoamerica During the same period, the study of the written documents, especially abundant in Mesopotamia, allowed configuration of the political structures in a more realistic and nuanced way, with a level of detail not inferior to that of the Classical world. A special role should be acknowledged to *Leo Oppenheim and to the ‘Sippar Project’** in the Oriental Institute of Chicago. The basic point in his approach was that, besides the central role of the ‘great organizations’ (royal palace and temples), the private sector too had its own political structures, its collective bodies: an assembly of all the (adult, male, free) citizens, and a restricted college of ‘elders’. The balance between large-scale organization and the private sector underwent several variations in time and space, but in general terms the image of the Oriental city became not very different from that of the Classical world, or of the European trajectory. FROM DECOLONIZATION TO THE ‘END OF IDEOLOGIES' Trends already operative during the 1960s and 1970s became pervasive when decolonization gave way to globalization, and the triumph of neo-capitalism brought about the ‘end of ideologies’ (if not of history). The model of the ‘temple-city’, once conceived under complete (economic and political) control of the priestly elite, has been nuanced and even discarded. The role of the Palace, so evident both in the material remains and in the texts, has been downgraded in the frame of the anti-state trends of our time. The concept of a ‘redistributive city’ (Polanyi’s model) is now refuted and a greater role is attributed to private enterprise and to trading houses. Recent inventories of city-states, in a worldwide perspective, had to abandon the polis model in its institutional sense, to include every polity small enough to be centred on one city only—a trend already started by Colin Renfrew with his ‘Early State Module’. In the same vein, recent inventories of empires include ‘shadow empires’ and ‘enlarged complex chiefdoms’. For sure, it is to be welcomed that concepts like ‘Power’ and ‘Freedom’, ‘Despotism’ and ‘Citizenship’, can no longer be considered as the exclusive patrimony of two opposed worlds, but as coexisting in both of them in different measure dependent on complex historical conditions and trends. Also the widespread use of graphic models, started by the New Geography, to visualize the structure of the city, the relations between cities, and between city and countryside, contribute to an undifferentiated and de-historicized appreciation of the phenomenon. The political influence of globalization is evident in the willingness to provide equal space and opportunities, even equal authorship, to each country. POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: THE ANCIENT THEORIES In the ancient Near East there was no explicit theory about the city or the state, while a lot of texts of varied nature (myths, rituals, royal inscriptions, wisdom literature) were devoted to the origin and role of the kingship and of the temples. Whether the king be a god himself (Egypt) or the ‘managing director’ of the state on behalf of the gods (Sumer, Assyria), the divine origin and overlordship of the state is the pivotal concept: temple and royal palace are on the fore, while the community of citizens receives no special attention. Urban exemptions and privileges are awarded by the king to ‘sacred’ cities (from Nippur to Assur), as an acknowledgement of the outstanding prestige of the city-god, not of the citizens. The secular philosophers, historians, and lawgivers of Archaic and Classical Greece classified political forms of power as either monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic. Yet, since ‘pure’ forms were hardly identified in the real inventory of the Greek constitutions, a mixed form progressively took the fore, and was canonized in Aristotle’s Politics. The ‘mixed constitution’ is based on the presence and reciprocal conditioning of a unique leader (be it a king or a tyrant), a restricted council (be it hereditary or elective), and a general assembly. In its looser sense, every ancient constitution was mixed, to a greater or lesser extent, from Athens to imperial Rome. What is here of interest is the idea that power (represented by the leader) and citizenship (represented by the assembly) can and should coexist and cooperate. The theory of the mixed constitution was transmitted and adapted to Rome (Polybius), and was eventually rediscovered by European humanists, to exert a notable influence on later political theories, ending in the Enlightenment and Modern ‘balance of powers’. In China, the Zhou-Li (going back to the time of the Han unification) was mainly interested in the material form of the ideal city, a form however reflecting an institutional model. In India, Kautilya (minister of the Maurya king Chandragupta) is the assumed author of the (rather later) Artashastra, a treatise on the art of government, with much emphasis on power over citizenship, and on royal behaviour rather than urban forms. From India too, the utopian description of the city Ayodhya in the Ramayana entered the later tradition as an authoritative model. THE MODERN VIEW: CITY VS. VILLAGE In its original configuration, a city is the administrative centre of a territorial state, the seat of a palace (or else of a temple with political competences). This is the model of the city-state, including a central town, with a periphery of rural villages, hamlets, pastoral encampments. Even if the polity grows to become a ‘regional’ or a ‘national’ state, and includes several towns, each town remains the seat of its structures of power, with a provincial palace instead of the royal palace. Besides the city, there is the village, which during the long millennia of pre-urban Neolithic was the only structured and permanently inhabited place, and also in later urbanized societies remained the seat of a substantial part of the population, obviously losing its independence and becoming linked to the city in an unequal relationship. In addition to the more evident differences in the realm of the material appearance—cities being bigger than villages, and being usually walled while villages were mostly ‘open’— what matters here is the institutional form. In terms of ‘Power’ vs. ‘Community’, we could say that the village has only communal institutions: collective bodies, temporary officials, diffuse participation based on age and kinship. Differently the city, in addition to the communal institutions inherited from the village, is also endowed with administrative and political institutions: a palace and/or one or more temples. The power is usually monocratic, hereditary, extended to the entire territory (city plus villages). In its practical exercise, the power of the palace is based on technical competences (scribes, administrative officials, etc.) rather than kinship (which remains a paramount factor in the selection of the leader). A contraposition between the institutions of power and the community of citizens, while not affecting the village, could be a problem in the city—although the overwhelming power of the palace leaves little space to a separate strategy for the local community. From this point of view, the cities of antiquity seem different from those of the European medieval and modern times. THE COMMUNAL INSTITUTIONS Both the villages and the communal sector of towns had a general assembly (gathering in case of emergency, or to solve strategic problems), a restricted body of ‘elders’ (in charge for judicial and inner political affairs), plus some public officials and a ‘mayor’, representing the community in its relations to the central government. In pre-urban villages these institutions were appropriate to cover all the needs of the community; while with the advent of urbanization and state formation political affairs were assumed by the palace, the local institutions being left with legal concerns. In the cities, the presence of the palace makes more evident the limited competence of the local institutions. In the Ancient Near East there was no difference between citizens and peasants: everybody living inside a kingdom (in cities or in the rural countryside) was a subject of the king. A basic difference existed between the ‘king’s servants’ (the members of the palace administration) and the common ‘free’ subjects. The king’s servants didn’t own personal properties or means of production, while the free families did—therefore they were ‘free’ in the economic sense, while being subjects politically. However, the rank and wealth of the king’s servants was higher than those of the free persons. The kings’ servants were concentrated in cities, while the majority of the free families were in villages, so that the Western idea of a link between freedom and city does not hold true in the ancient Orient. In Greece, on the contrary, citizenship was selective, reserved to free landholders living in the city, to the exclusion of foreigners and of workers devoid of landed property. The restricted concept of citizenship, based on specific requirements, will become typical of the Western tradition, especially in medieval Europe, in connection with the model of cities devoid of (and opposed to) the royal palace. THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE CENTRAL POWER By definition, *all cities contain central institutions running their activities that can be sorted into two general types: the palace and the temple. The palace is an institutional and architectural complex including: the abode of a secular ruler, the seat of the state administration and archives the seat of the economic activities belonging to the state organization (workshops and stores) The palace is generally big, with monumental embellishments (for public admiration), Often secluded and protected not only from outsiders but also from the common population. The role and burden of the temple is more varied. It can include the political leadership, in the so-called temple-city, but this model is rare (Uruk period in early Mesopotamia) and questionable. The temple can be alone, without palace, in ‘sacred cities’ different from the ‘administrative cities’ and the capital city (e.g. in the ‘second urbanization’ of India). It can consist of a unique temple (in monotheistic religions: e.g. the Jerusalem temple; but large towns have a plurality of temples or churches for various quarters, or for ‘saints’), or more often of a set of temples, the most important of them for the city god. THE ATYPICAL FORMS The most frequent constitution of the ancient city, described above, corresponds to the urban form of a ‘lower town’, hosting the community, and an ‘upper town’ (citadel, acropolis) hosting the palace and temples. There are many varieties, of course, and the distinction between public and private space is better visible in newly planned towns than in those grown up disorderly. The citadel can be located in the centre, but also at the extreme periphery. The temples can be separated from the palace, and enclosed or not into a sacred precinct. One such ‘atypical’ model could be defined ‘Cities without Citadels’: large towns, so large that the label ‘village’ sounds inappropriate, entirely built up of private houses, with no inner partitions, no urban planning, and no public (apart from cultic) buildings. Such settlements can be defined towns but not cities, and are enormously enlarged villages—with a demographic growth not balanced by an institutional adjustment. URBANISM AND POLITICS A confrontation of the political structures governing the city, and the material features of the urban setting, could contribute to a better balanced evaluation of the relations between power and citizenship— avoiding both the ideologically biased approach of the old theories, and the de-structured approach of the more recent trends. Our attempt is to sort the public buildings in two sets: (a) the seats of power (b) the seats of communal life All public buildings are generally built by the central power—with exceptions of private ‘euergetism’ in the Hellenistic to late antique milieu. But buildings of: class (a), hosting the basic functions of government, were run by the central power, were hardly accessible to common people class (b) were intended as services for the community were run by the community itself were widely accessible Intermediate cases do remain, and some buildings (especially the temples) can belong to either class according to periods. But a general heuristic value of our sorting can be maintained. THE SEATS OF POWER The palace The palace is ubiquitous, as implied by the very definition of city. It can be the abode of a king (in the ‘capital city’), or of a governor (‘provincial palace’) in extended polities including several cities. This happens because of technical and logistic factors: the administration of the economy, but also of the justice, could not be easily run beyond a limited extent, so that a regional state (even less an ‘empire’) cannot be but a multi-cellular organism. In several cases the palace complex is located on a ‘citadel’ or ‘acropolis’, or in an ‘inner city’—a model visible in the city plan, but also in descriptions of the ideal city. The Greek (or better said Athenian) model of a city without a palace (whose functions have been devolved to city officials) remains rather exceptional in a wider perspective encompassing the entire ancient world. The temple The temple is always present, at various levels of relevance and complexity, in every urban centre. Its role as seat of power is even older than that of the palace (the ‘first urbanization’ of the Uruk period had no secular palace), and the space it occupies is generally bigger, for various reasons. First, the polytheistic religions require a plurality of temples, one for each god or goddess. Second, the ceremonial function of the temples requires wide spaces in outer courtyards, for the admittance of large crowds. Third, in the ancient world the temple hosted important economic activities requiring additional spaces for administration, storing, and specialized workshops. Probably we should differentiate temples as belonging either to our class (a) when endowed with political power, or to our class (b) when running the religious life of the community. In the course of time, especially after the advent of the ‘ethic’ monotheistic religions, the economic role of the temple became less visible, oriented towards public assistance rather than profit, as with the waqf of the Islamic mosque and similar institutions of the Christian churches. A separate discussion should be reserved for cemeteries, the disposal of dead bodies being a religious and civic affair, usually located in extra-urban spaces, even reaching a high level of monumentality for the sake of power legitimation and socio-political cohesion. This important topic cannot be reasonably dealt with here. Public granaries and storehouses In a simplified way, we can assign to the ‘seats of power’ the economic structures of the redistributive economies, but assign the market to the communal features. Obviously, whenever the royal palace and the temples owned large extents of land, they had to concentrate the product in central granaries, to eventually use it in providing with food rations their dependants and the corvée workers. Public granaries are also present in cities of non-royal states with democratic constitutions, since the food reserves are in any case needed as a public insurance against recurrent shortages and problems of provisioning. Among other kinds of public storehouses, those concerning military activities are especially important: from arsenals or armories, to stables (for horses), to caserns (for the standing army), all of them more or less ubiquitous through the course of ancient history. Tribunals and jails In the ancient Near East, the tribunal can gather in whatever meeting point (at the city gate, in a square, in front of a temple, under a big tree), depending on the status of judges (the king’s judges, or the elders), but in any case with no specific building. Tribunals have dedicated buildings in the Greek and Roman world. On the contrary, the jail is ubiquitous in antiquity, at an early stage as annexed to the palace, and becoming better visible in the Greek, Roman, and later worlds. Fortifications Ancient cities are usually walled—while rural villages are not. THE SPACES OF THE CITY COMMUNITY The seat of public officials In the ancient Near East, in ancient India and China, the identification of specific buildings hosting the community officials is quite rare: in Assur there was a ‘House of the Eponymofficial’. We can just imagine that the officials, during their term of office, simply used their own house to receive people. In the Classical world, on the contrary, specific buildings for public officials are common: e.g. the Greek Prytaneion, or the Roman abodes of the various praefecti. But in Rome (also in Byzantium and in China) the officials in charge with various sectors of city life (public order, food provisioning, fires, etc.) were responsible toward the emperor and not the community. Public meetings and activities took place also in special buildings, especially in spaces around the open area: both the agora and the forum were sided by covered columned porches, the Greek stoa or the Roman and Byzantine basilica, to be used for political, economic, and cultural activities. By contrast, in the cities of Asia—from Mesopotamia and Egypt to India and China—there were no relevant and structurally conceived squares. The model of a central open space surrounded by houses was rather common in villages. The marketplace. In the redistributive economies of the ancient East, there was no need for a specific and permanent marketplace. The long-distance trade ended up by the palace or temple administration, and periodic fairs were accommodated in front of a temple, or outside the city gate. Local exchange took place in urban streets or inside the city gate. In coastal or river towns, the (un)loading wharf was a crucial site. In China the market was on the northern side of the palace, being not a space for free exchange, but an interface between palace and merchants. In Han and post-Han China, large marketplaces were used also for a variety of activities. In India (according to the Artashastra) there was no marketplace. Quite different is the organization of trade in the Greek and Roman towns, where the marketplace had a specific location and a relevant visibility in the city plan. The Classical organization was also transmitted to the East, since Hellenistic times, and thus became a normal feature inherited by the Islamic city, where the suq or bazaar is a specific and central quarter. Another architectural accommodation for the running of trade is the caravanserai, located at a distance from the city; missing in pre-Classical and also in Greek times, it was introduced in late antiquity to develop later into the Islamic khan. Public performances. In the ancient Near East there were no special buildings hosting public performances, and the same applies to ancient India and China. In Classical Greece, the theatre became an independent institution and an important feature in the urban landscape, to be inherited by the Hellenistic cities and those of the Roman empire. In Rome, besides the theatre, the amphitheatre is also a prominent building (the Colisseum being an outstanding example). Care of the mind. The non-alphabetic writing systems of ancient civilizations were so complex as to require a long training, generating a specific class of scribes, working in the public administration. There was no literacy outside of the ‘great organizations’, no access to written documents by the common people, so that schools, scriptoria, archives, and libraries were only hosted inside the palace or temple complexes. Water and garbage. As to the availability of water inside the city, a necessity in case of siege, cisterns and tunnels (leading to springs) were a common feature. The need is less prominent in cities located along rivers, or in the alluvium, with wells reaching the water table. Cisterns inside the city walls will grow up in size and complexity through the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods, and not only in arid lands. Aqueducts were a prominent feature in the urban landscape of Rome and Byzantium. Public fountains inside the urban texture are complementary to aqueducts. Devices for the disposal of water and of liquid refuse are normally present in every urban settlement since the origin of towns, in the form of small sewers in the centre of each street, eventually interconnected into a true and proper sewerage system, in accordance with the size and the architectural sophistication of the town, especially in Roman and later periods. The disposal of solid waste (admittedly, not a big problem in antiquity) in the preClassical world seems to be left to private behaviour, with no ‘public’ intervention: heaps of refuse accumulated inside the city, in the streets, in non-built spaces, or around the city walls. Only when streets became paved did the disposal of solid waste require an intervention by the community as a whole. THE INTERNAL ARTICULATION In between the installations of the ‘total power’ of the palace, and those of the local/ diffuse needs of the citizenship, we can locate some intermediate structures and institutions. In the ancient Near East and in Greece, the urban texture was marked only by blocks and streets, in an irregular or an orthogonal grid, with no special implication. Foreign merchants hosted in a separate settlement outside of the city wall provide a special case. Only in late antiquity separate quarters for different ethnic, religious, or working groups, often walled (and bolted during the night), became common. A similar development took place also in Han China, with separate quarters for artisans, merchants, and foreign communities. The need for protection inside the city, originally felt only by the ruling elite (walled citadel) became a necessity with the advent of multiethnic and multi-religious urban communities—yet the very same size of an imperial capital city generated the need for separate wards with separate supervisors (the Han capital was divided into 160 wards). Besides separate quarters, special working groups could develop institutions of their own: gilds of merchants, specialized workmen, professional soldiers, once part of the palace administration, could have a seat for their self-governing bodies, especially in Late Antiquity (and later periods). It remains unclear whether the Indian castes were living (already in the Mauryan period) in separate quarters. CONCLUDING REMARKS The traditional idea of a neat divide between an ‘Oriental city’ based on power and a ‘Western city’ based on citizenship seems to be discarded as a result of proper comparative analysis. There is rather a divide between two major historical phases. The existence of a pan-Asiatic model of the ‘administrative city’ (stretching from Uruk Mesopotamia to Mauryan India and Han China) is also of doubtful value, originating well before there was any city in Europe, so that it is rather a matter of (Asiatic) persistence vs. (European) innovation. In a first phase, besides the ‘residual village’ of the private houses, the city hosted public buildings only for the sake of power, and not for the services of the common population. In a second phase, two trends changed the shape of the city: buildings for the services and the institutions of the community came into being, and the temple sector moved its main pertinence from the sphere of power to the sphere of community. Basically, we can say that the structures of power had always and everywhere been in existence, since the first urbanization. On the contrary, the communal institutions and their urban visibility grew up in the course of time, with a sudden upsurge in the mid-1st millennium BCE, centered in Greece. But most communal institutions will be inherited both in the West (Roman empire) and in the East (Hellenistic, Byzantine, but also Islamic cities). The mainstream of modern studies has long been influenced by various distorting factors: the model of power as located outside of the city (in the medieval castle or in the earlymodern residency), which has no counterpart in antiquity the model of the ‘democratic’ polis of Greece, which is so restricted in time and space as to be hardly universal or paradigmatic. The presence of a strong political power in the city reduced the role of the collective bodies, and exerted an evident effect on the urban community, in various forms. The economic effects (taxation and corvée) are notorious, and also the juridical effects (law codes, royal edicts, granting of privileges) are notable. But quite relevant too are the effects on urban life, in the form of ceremonial structures and events that characterize cities as opposed to countryside. Ceremony, intended to legitimate power and enhance social cohesion, was located both in the palace proper and in the temples (festivals, parades, etc.). Finally, ***the model of free and wealthy citizens, as opposed to enslaved and poor peasants, derives from the medieval and early modern conditions, but does not apply to most of the ancient world. Freedom was not a political discrimination: both the public dependants and the members of common families, were simply subjects of the king. The idea that free citizens (and peasants as well) should never lose their free status was very persistent, and protected by royal measures of debt remission. Terms usually translated as ‘freedom’ mean more properly ‘liberation’ (from temporary servitude), while at the level of an entire urban community, ‘freedom’ is a royal exemption from taxes and military service. Cities protesting their ‘freedom’ were just defending their privileges. People looking for personal freedom were more frequently fleeing from cities to the countryside, even in its extreme forms of wooded hills and arid steppe. Words Paradigm - a typical example or pattern of something; a model. Patrimony - property inherited from one's father or male ancestor.