Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life > Status Update

End chapter 8, towns and cities. Towns as outposts of modernity, consideration of Naples, St. Petersburg, Peking and London. The ancient regime as rural society, towns and cities offer a glimpse of The world to come.

Do visitors to the United States and Japan today always realise that they are looking at the future, near or distant, of their own countries?

These densely populated cities, in part parasites, do not arise of their own volition. They are what society, the economy, & politics allow or oblige them to be. They are a yardstick, a means of measurement. If they display ostentatious luxury, that is because society, the economy, and the political and cultural order are cast in this mould

Delhi was undoubtedly much more the Great Mogul's town than Paris was Louis XIV's. The bankers & tradesmen in the Great Chandni Choke street, however richbthey sometimes were, did not count in relation to the sovereign, his court & his army. When Aurangzeb embarked on the journey which brought him as far as Kashmir in 1663, the whole town followed him because they could not live without his favours & liberality.

Only the West swing completely over in favour of its towns. The towns caused The West to advance. It wa, let us repeat, an enormous event, butvthe deep-seated reasons behond it are still inadequately explained. What would the Chinese towns have become if the junks had discovered the Cape of Good Hope at the beginning of the 15th century& had made full use of such a chance of world conquest?

Capitalism & towns were basically the same thing in the West. Lewis Mumford humorously claimed that capitalism was the cuckoo's egg laid in the confined nest of the medieval towns...the wealth of the state would still be the wealth of the town: Portugal converged on Lisbon, the Netherlands Amsterdam, & English primacy was London's primacy...

A new state of mind was established, broadly that of an early, still faltering, Western capitalism- a collection of rules, possibilities, calculations, the art both of getting rich & of living. It also included gambling & risk

Towns as outposts of modernity:
Financial organisation: taxation, public credit, coinage
Industry and guilds
Communities and societies with tensions & civil struggles
"The cities were the West' s 1st focus for patriotism- & the patriotism they inspired was long to be more coherent & much more conscious than the territorial kind, which emerged only slowly in the 1st states.

Whether one is discussing costumes, money, towns or capitalism, it is impossible, after Max Weber, to avoid comparisons, because Europe has never stopped explaining itself 'in relation to other continents'.

Islamic towns were very large as a rule, & distant from each other. Their low houses were clustered together like pomegranate seeds. Islam prohibited high houses, deeming them a mark of odious pride...since the houses could not grow upwards, they encroached upon the public way which was poorly protected by Muslim law.