Ancient Rome was one of the greatest cities of the pre-industrial era. Like other such great cities, it has often been deemed parasitic, a drain on the resources of the society that supported it. Rome's huge population was maintained not by trade or manufacture but by the taxes and rents of the empire. It was the archetypal 'consumer city'. However, such a label does not do full justice to the impact of the city on its hinterland. This book examines the historiography of the consumer city model and reappraises the relationship between Rome and Italy. Drawing on archaeological work and comparative evidence, the author shows how the growth of the city can be seen as the major influence on the development of the Italian economy in this period as its demands for food and migrants promoted changes in agriculture, marketing systems and urbanisation throughout the peninsula.

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.

This is Volume II of a series of six on Urban and Regional Economics originally published in 1960. This study discusses the future of urban developments in America. Has they already have megapolitan belts, sprawling regions of quasi-urban settlement stretching along coast lines or major transportation routes, current concepts of the community stand to be challenged. What will remain of local government and institutions if locality ceases to have any historically recognizable form? The situations described in this book pertain to the mid-century United States of some 150 million people. What serviceable image of metropolis and region can we fashion for a country of 300 million? The prospect for such a population size by the end of the twentieth century is implicit in current growth rates, as is the channeling of much of the growth into areas now called metropolitan or in process of transfer to that class.

One of the oldest metropolitan areas in North America, Montreal has evolved from a remote fur-trading post in New France into an international center for services and technology. A city and an island located at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, it is uniquely situated to serve as an international port while also providing rail access to the Canadian interior. The historic capital of the Province of Canada, once Canada's foremost metropolis, Montreal has a multifaceted cultural heritage drawn from European and North American influences. Thanks to its rich past, the city offers an ideal setting for the study of an evolving urban environment. Metropolitan Natures presents original histories of the diverse environments that constitute Montreal and it region. It explores the agricultural and industrial transformation of the metropolitan area, the interaction of city and hinterland, and the interplay of humans and nature. The fourteen chapters cover a wide range of issues, from landscape representations during the colonial era to urban encroachments on the Kahnawake Mohawk reservation on the south shore of the island, from the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic and its ensuing human environmental modifications to the urban sprawl characteristic of North America during the postwar period. Situations that politicize the environment are discussed as well, including the economic and class dynamics of flood relief, highways built to facilitate recreational access for the middle class, power-generating facilities that invade pristine rural areas, and the elitist environmental hegemony of fox hunting. Additional chapters examine human attempts to control the urban environment through street planning, waterway construction, water supply, and sewerage.

The first accessible guide for students to show how theories, models and concepts have been applied to ancient history.

Historians have long argued about the place of trade in classical antiquity: was it the life-blood of a complex, Mediterranean-wide economic system, or a thin veneer on the surface of an underdeveloped agrarian society? Trade underpinned the growth of Athenian and Roman power, helping to supply armies and cities. It furnished the goods that ancient elites needed to maintain their dominance - and yet, those same elites generally regarded trade and traders as a threat to social order. Trade, like the patterns of consumption that determined its development, was implicated in wider debates about politics, morality and the state of society, just as the expansion of trade in the modern world is presented both as the answer to global poverty and as an instrument of exploitation and cultural imperialism. This 2007 book explores the nature and importance of ancient trade, considering its ecological and cultural significance as well as its economic aspects.

The regional character of Canada and the crucial role of metropolitan development in its history have been recurring themes in the work of J.M.S. Careless. In these essays he returns to those themes, discussing how national and regional identity in Canada show vital links with metropolitan-hinterland relationship across time and space. The first essay presents an overall appraisal of the historic connections between metropolitan centres and frontiers or regions in Canada. These connections might be manifested in economic structures, political fabrics, or social networks, and also in modes of opinion and popular images and traditions. The second part of the book inquires into some major conceptual treatments given to frontier and metropolis in history. The third seeks to evaluate the impact of metropolitanism on distinctive features of identity that are revealed in Canadian historical experience. A fourth essays rounds out the volume by discussing the influence of external metropolanism in Canada. Careless endows his subject with the combined fornce of his own continuing research, his sensitivity to the new historical scholarship, and the lively and penetrating mind that have made him one of Canada's leading historians for more than thirty years.

How do ancient historians pursue their craft? From the evidence of coins, pottery shards, remains of buildings, works of art, and, above all, literary texts--all of which have survived more or less accidentally from antiquity--they fashion works of history. But how exactly do they go about reconstructing and representing the past? How should history be written? These and related questions are the subject of Neville Morley's engaging introduction to the theory and philosophy of history. Intended for students and teachers not only of ancient history but of historiography, the philosophy of history, and classics, his book addresses the implications of debates over methodological and theoretical issues for the practice of ancient history. At the present time, Morley says, students of ancient history are left to come to their own understanding of the field through a process of trial and error. In his view, too many professors regard "questions of theory and methodology... as pointless distractions from the business of actually doing history. Worse, [these questions] may even be perceived as a threat to the subject." Asserting that more attention must be given to fundamental matters, Morley considers such topics as the nature of historical narrative, style in historical writing, the use and abuse of sources, and the reasons for studying history.