10.1177/106939702237308Cross-Cultural Research / November 2002hase-Dunn, Manning / CITY AND WORLD SYSTEMS City Systems and World Systems: Four Millennia of City Growth and Decline

This is a study of the growth of cities in four regions over the past 4,000 years. The authors discuss changes in the relationship between political/military power, economic power, and city systems with special attention to the rise of European hegemony and the subse-quent rise of East Asian world cities. They compare East Asian ur-ban growth with the original heartland of cities in West Asia and North Africa, as well as Europe and the subcontinent of South Asia. This reveals the trajectories of city growth and decline and the rela-tive importance of the different regions over time. And they re-examine the hypothesis of synchronicities of city growth and decline across distant regions as the Afro-Eurasian world system became more and more integrated. The comparative study of settlement systems is an important ba-sis of our understanding of human social evolution. The processes by which a world inhabited by small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands became the single global political economy of today involved the growth of settlement sizes and the expansion of interactio