The Preindustrial City: Past and Present

by Gideon Sjoberg

From Simon & Schuster, The Preindustrial City by Gideon Sjoberg examines city life both in the past and present.

In his work, Sjoberg takes readers on a journey through the history of cities—from their beginnings and the cities that were independently invented to the different economic, political, and religious structures common in cities.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1965

Reviews

[John Mccullough · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE PREINDUSTRIAL CITY by Gideon Sjoberg

Ever since our ancestors evolved into monkeys, they lived in small groups, foraging as they migrated along. That pattern persisted until we were able to find concentrated plentiful resources such as the salmon-rich Pacific Northwest where large villages developed. Then, in several world locations around 12,000 years ago humans began to plant crops and domesticate animals, in addition to the dog, for food consumption. Agriculture, which Jared Diamond calls “Man’s Greatest Mistake,” had begun.

After the development of agriculture, population sizes grew from settlements to villages to a few towns and eventually a few towns grew into extremely large towns that we would call cities. What is a city? Large population size certainly. Then many traits follow as described by sociologist Gideon Sjoberg in this very useful book published in 1960.

When many people end up living in the same low-technology setting how should people be organized so that the city functions for so many people? With small populations everyday activities are controlled by custom and informal enforcement. If you grow up in a small Neolithic village, you know everyone and learn what everyone does and you act in accordance with these accepted practices. How about when you have so many people you can’t know them all? Simply growing up and imitating neighbors will not work. The result is, to avoid chaos, some people take control and organize the place and you end up with a functioning city. All higher vertebrates invariably use pecking order as an organizing principle and humans are no exception – we just call it social class. As a human biologist, this is my assessment, not that of Sjoberg.

So, what is this city like? Sociologist Sjoberg sets out to define their characteristics, especially to contrast their basic nature with modern cities, which sociologists had considered to be what cities have always been. Not so says Sjoberg! And he is correct. The Industrial Age has ushered in an entirely different kind of critter that an ancient would hardly recognize.

Following my reductionist suggestion, the informal and personal pecking order of smaller settlements becomes crystalized as formal institutionalized social order. A dominating group emerges and takes control of the political order (kingship), religion (high priesthood), economy (demanding tribute to support their exhalted position), social structure (within-class marriages), education creating a “great tradition” for the upper class and a “little tradition” for the peasants, using the terms of anthropologist Robert Redfield. The structure is maintained politically (divine kingship and military suppression), religiously (resort to religious traditions and threats of a bad afterlife, or actual execution of dissidents), education (only of the upper classes) and economically (impoverishment of lower classes).

Economic control is a delicate balance for the rulers. Money is power and some merchants can become wealthy, yet the rulers need the money to maintain their privileged status, so some compromises must be made. And there are the less-easily controlled elements - my Harvard-educated archaeologist professors flippantly defined “city” as any settlement large and diverse enough to support thieves, beggars and prostitutes.

One important element that Sjoberg treats only tangentially is the crucial interaction of the city with the surrounding rural communities that provide the bulk of food and money to maintain the city.

This basic preindustrial pattern persisted until the advent of the Industrial Revolution turned everything upside down. In some countries the preindustrial pattern is still undergoing a difficult transition so attention to the changes is important. The social order of the preindustrial city is eerily similar to the vision of many conservative American politicians in 2023. Do we really want to go back 400+ years and recreate a feudal social order? Is this the answer to our future?

The book is old – published in 1960 - yet it is still important historically to understand our past, our transition to industrialization two hundred years ago, and the next transition which we are now living through. For years I used this book in one of my lectures concern the Evolution of Human Health. I still respect it 8 years after my retirement.

[Peter Goggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paired well with James Scott's book, Against the Grain.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are basically two competing forces in any attempt to understand different cultures and times. One is that everything is different, unique. The other is that there are certain common themes and patterns. People who focus on the former are Splitters; people who focus on the latter are Lumpers. Obviously, saying “it all depends”, while usually the correct answer, is also a useless one. A lifetime of study on any culture will not exhaust the details to be learned, and if you still can't say anything about anything, then you might as well shut down the Sociology departments worldwide.

But, if you're going to make any kind of generalizations at all, you need to figure out what groups to compare. You need to be a wise Lumper. Sjoberg recommends here that one wise way to look at things is to recognize that all (or nearly all) pre-industrial cities share certain traits, whether it's 3000 B.C. Babylon, 10th century A.D. Cairo, or late 19th century Kandahar. Knowing what these common traits are, allows you to recognize which elements are truly unique (or nearly so) to that place and time.

He starts with a broad sweep of the history (and pre-history) of cities, from Mesopotamia, the Nile and Indus river valleys, Mesoamerica, and the valley of Huang Ho. Then he examines in detail different aspects like how were they organized? How did they get the countryside to give them their food surplus? How was family life, living space, etc. different between the ruling elite and the laboring masses?

One interesting topic is that of how women and girls were treated (both by men and by other women), where in some ways there is more in common between families of the same class, though in different continents and millennia, than there is between families of very different classes in the same city. The upper class chooses the daughter's (and son's) spouse for them, the daughter goes to live with the son after the marriage, and several generations of the extended family live together in the same residence. In lower class families, the individual (or couple) are much more likely to be thrown on their own devices.

The importance of family and, frankly, genetics is returned to repeatedly throughout the book. The forces of banking and trade, usually low-status or at least morally suspect professions, are held in suspicion primarily because they are so little bound by what your DNA is. We tend to think of these as conservative forces nowadays, but in pre-industrial cities they were subversive, tolerated only because they were felt to be necessary evils, in the same way that prostitution was tolerated but never really condoned.

In religion there is often a tendency to look at the differences between, say, Hinduism and Islam, Buddhism and Taoism. Sjoberg points out that the religion of the lower classes in pre-industrial cities, regardless of what continent or nominal sect, is almost invariably populated with demons, djinn, ghosts, or some other name for a panoply of protective and/or malevolent spirits. The religion of the upper classes, more similar in many ways to that in industrial cities, may still be influenced by these beliefs but is officially at least disdainful or dismissive of them. In the details of how a religion is actually practiced, the upper and lower class of the pre-industrial city may differ as much or more than the difference between one nominal religious faith and another.

The fundamental thesis of the book is that the transition from pre-industrial to industrial city, because it eroded this perpetual foundation of extended family and hereditary class, was great enough to make the pre- and post-industrial cities as different from each other as either one was from the rural countryside. The idea that your profession is something you had some significant amount of choice in, that you could choose which neighborhood to live in (among those you had money for), that you married for love and might practice a religion similar in all details to that of those in classes above and below you, all eroded the importance of family and class (i.e. ancestry). In the pre-industrial city, the long shadow of who your great-great-grandparents were still loomed large over nearly every person, in a way that is almost inconceivable today. Sjoberg does a good job of taking us through this alien world, enjoying it like a trip to an exotic land with fascinating differences in culture and tradition, but one in which you have no wish to stay, and once the trip is done you appreciate just a bit more that it is not the world into which you were born.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely dense and scholarly, not something I was read to read when I did. Good stuff, good explanations and tie-ins, just a lot of it above my academic level.