Great cities

Tunku Varadarajan reviews The Great Cities In History edited by John Julius Norwich:

The world has, for much of its history, been a place of fragments. During the Middle Ages, many cities were so far-flung as to be virtually unknown to each other. Cairo, Palermo, Benin, Angkor and the Incan capital of Cuzco were "great" but only in isolation. And greatness, often, was a product of the imagination. Timbuktu's aura, we learn, was built partially on a mythical reputation spread by word of mouth. During the 14th century, its ruler, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he generously dispensed gold to the faithful. Thereafter writers and diplomats traveled to the supposed source of this largess, only to be disappointed.

How did cities arise in the first place? Hunting and gathering had kept people apart; so, as Mr. Norwich writes, "towns and cities could be said to be born of agriculture." It was farming that united man in critical numbers and durable structures, resulting in "the world's first city" in Mesopotamian Uruk.

Until the modern age, the success of a city relied largely on firm top-down management and a people's ability to live in close contact without an excess of bloodshed. Many of the pre-modern cities that make Mr. Norwich's cut—Istanbul, Athens, Baghdad from the eighth century to the 13th—tolerated cultural and religious diversity, even while making use of slave labor and imposing strict order on all that vibrant flourishing beloved by social-studies teachers.

The rest here.