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Discord Invitation

26th March 2017

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Addendum on Single City Civilizations

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In Another Counterfactual: Single City Civilizations I treated the possibility of a single-city civilization as a counterfactual, considering what it might be like for a civilization to originate in a single city and to grow from that single city into a planetary scale civilization. While this particular scenario is counterfactual, the idea of a single-city civilization as a regional civilization may not be counterfactual.

In my answer to the Quora question Are there still lost cities and lost ancient civilizations to be found in South and Central America, or have we located every important site?  I suggested the following possibility:

“…there may be regions in South and Central America sufficiently isolated that there was a culture unknown to contemporary history and archaeology that built tombs filled with grave goods. Such an isolated culture may be associated with a city too small to have been discovered so far, and it would probably be fair to describe this as a ‘lost civilization’.”

There are, of course, many civilizations that have been (or are at present) dominated by a single city. The Roman Empire was dominated by the city of Rome, and the Byzantine Empire was dominated by the city of Constantinople. And Constantinople was such a powerful city that after the end of Byzantine civilization it went on to dominate the Ottoman Empire as its central city. However, all of these examples are of dominant central cities in a network of lesser cities.  

In terms of agricultural civilizations, it is easy to imagine a single city that stands at the hub of many agricultural villages, none of which individually constitute a genuine city, and even if taken together would not quite constitute a civilization, but which when unified by a central city (which may also be the central project of that civilization) does constitute a civilization. One might characterize the Nazca civilization in this way, dominated by Cahuachi, which archaeologists believe to have been a ceremonial city that was not inhabited as an ordinary city would be lived in.

I have suggested on several occasions that a number of cities interacting in cooperation and conflict is a threshold of civilization (cf. The Being of Civilization), but a different paradigm of civilization could emerge from a loosely-coupled network of single city civilizations that interact in relationships of cooperation and conflict. We have a model of this in early modern Italy and Germany, before these regions were unified as nation-states, which regions consisted of a large number of small states (usually referred to as “petty kingdoms”) which were little more a central city ruling over an agricultural hinterland.

We can speak of an Italian renaissance civilization or a Venetian civilization, and it would be difficult to define a cut off below which we could be unwilling to apply the title of “civilization.” There is, I think, as certain hesitancy to apply the concept of civilization to a single city, but there are definitely a few cases where this is appropriate, so that fixing a lower bound of civilization – in terms of population, geographical extent, duration in time, or some other metric – is sensitive to the context. And what of an upper bound to civilization? How far do our intuitions guide us in evaluating whether an entity extended in terms of population, spatial extent, or duration in time constitutes a civilization? Does there come a point beyond which we hesitate to apply the concept of civilization because the object of our judgment is too large?

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Tagged: civilizationurbanismcity