We live in the ‘urban century’. Cities all over the world – in both developing and developed countries – display complex evolutionary patterns. Urban Empires charts the backgrounds, mechanisms, drivers, and consequences of these radical changes in our contemporary systems from a global perspective and analyses the dominant position of modern cities in the ‘New Urban World’. This volume views the drastic change cities have undergone internationally through a broad perspective and considers their emerging roles in our global network society. Chapters from renowned scholars provide advanced analytical contributions, scaling applied and theoretical perspectives on the competitive profile of urban agglomerations in a globalizing world. Together, the volume traces and investigates the economic and political drivers of network cities in a global context and explores the challenges over governance that are presented by mega-cities. It also identifies and maps out the new geography of the emergent ‘urban century’. With contributions from well-known and influential scholars from around the world, Urban Empires serves as a touchstone for students and researchers keen to explore the scientific and policy needs of cities as they become our age’s global power centers.

This book explores the various ways imperial rule constituted and shaped the cities of Eastern Europe until the First World War in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. In these three empires, the cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served as the stages where the empire was displayed in monumental architecture and public rituals. To this day, many cities possess a distinctively imperial legacy in the form of material remnants, groups of inhabitants, or memories that shape the perceptions of in- and outsiders. The contributions to this volume address in detail the imperial entanglements of a dozen cities from a long-term perspective reaching back to the eighteenth century. They analyze the imperial capitals as well as smaller cities in the periphery. All of them are "imperial cities" in the sense that they possess traces of imperial rule. By comparing the three empires of Eastern Europe this volume seeks to establish commonalities in this particular geography and highlight trans-imperial exchanges and entanglements. This volume is essential reading to students and scholars alike interested in imperial and colonial history, urban history and European history.

"Originally published in the U.K. in 2014 under the title Ten cities that made an empire, by Allen Lane, London."

Exploring the urban and planning history of cities across Central and South-eastern Europe against a background of rising nationalism, this book contains fourteen studies of individual cities. Introductory chapters in the book outline the political history of the area and how the developments in the different countries were interconnected.

Winner of the prestigious MacIver Award when it was first published, this remains a towering work of modern political sociology, especially of macrosociology. Its main objective is comparative analysis of political commonalities found in different societies, both historical and present. The book seeks to find some pattern or laws in the structure and development of such systems. The imaginative use of data helps to bring order into what might otherwise be considered a speculative volume. The purpose of The Political Systems of Empires is to apply sociological concepts to the analysis of historical societies through the comparative analysis of a special type of political system. This analysis does not purport to be historical or descriptive. Its main objective is comparative analysis of political commonalities found in different societies. The book seeks to find some pattern or laws in the structure and development of such systems.

More than half the people in the world live in cities, including a growing number of megacities with populations exceeding ten million people. This trend means that an understanding of urbanization must be an urgent priority for Christian theology and mission across the globe. This updated edition of Seeking a City with Foundations, with an additional chapter, explores Christian responses to the city, ranging from rejecting the urban as evil, to embracing it as being central to God’s redemptive purposes. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including history, social science, urban planning, and the history of art, readers are given a detailed text which confronts the challenges that contemporary urbanization presents to world Christianity. Looking at urbanism as a theme throughout Scripture, culminating with the great vision of the New Jerusalem, David Smith explains that God’s own future is revealed as urban, highlighting the need to identify modern-day idols as we share the gospel in cities and acknowledge the impact of global economic forces. The book also explores the causes of what has been called the divided city and traces the urban theme through the Bible to present an alternative vision of the urban future – a future in which the injustices in ever-growing slums and a crisis of meaning among the privileged might be overcome through the power of the reconciling message of the cross. This timely book proposes a way forward for urban mission, highlighting that transformation of our cities must be the focal point of Christian mission and hope.

The book deals with the concept of urban infrastructure and the strong evolution of globalization, in particular the driving force taken by global cities. Urban infrastructure is a constituent part of the global cities, both have a synergistic evolution. The main reference is to western global cities in the intertwining of financialization, settling and brownfield which is a little different from the urbanization of other global cities of other non- developed countries, or emerging countries. There is therefore a significant link between globalization and urban infrastructure. The occurrence of slowbalization can have consequences on urban areas infrastructures and more generally on the different dichotomy between global city and nation. With the pandemic infectious and the post COVID, there is already a different configuration between the global city and the rest of the national territory. A driving element of the urban infrastructure and the global city has been the financialization and identification of assets within global cities. Urban infrastructure as an asset has grown considerably in the last two decades, in the wake of what has already been highlighted previously for real estate. There are contiguous issues that affect the concept of urban infrastructures and they are the enormous growth of finance and the landings of this in the great cities of the world with investments that first involved Real Estate and then urban infrastructures. There has also been a technological revolution that has merged the ubiquitous technological infrastructure with other more traditional components of the infrastructure, even apparently recent themes, such as smart cities, come from this evolutionary trend and merge with urban infrastructures. The theme of smart cities, if properly interpreted, gives strength to the concept of urban infrastructure.

An original history of the most enduring colonial creation, the city, explored through ten portraits of powerful urban centers the British Empire left in its wake At its peak, the British Empire was an urban civilization of epic proportions, leaving behind a network of cities which now stand as the economic and cultural powerhouses of the twenty-first century. In a series of ten vibrant urban biographies that stretch from the shores of Puritan Boston to Dublin, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Liverpool, and beyond, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt demonstrates that urbanism is in fact the most lasting of Britain's imperial legacies. Combining historical scholarship, cultural criticism, and personal reportage, Hunt offers a new history of empire, excavated from architecture and infrastructure, from housing and hospitals, sewers and statues, prisons and palaces. Avoiding the binary verdict of empire as "good" or "bad," he traces the collaboration of cultures and traditions that produced these influential urban centers, the work of an army of administrators, officers, entrepreneurs, slaves, and renegades. In these ten cities, Hunt shows, we also see the changing faces of British colonial settlement: a haven for religious dissenters, a lucrative slave-trading post, a center of global hegemony. Lively, authoritative, and eye-opening, Cities of Empire makes a crucial new contribution to the history of colonialism.

"Like all empires, Japan’s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan’s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China’s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold’s political status vis-à-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region’s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation.In this study, Emer O’Dwyer traces the history of Japan’s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria—and especially its principal city, Dairen—was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army’s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers’ determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire."