Toward the end of the Iron I, the vast majority of the many rural villages excavated in the highlands were abandoned. At the same time, a handful of settlements began to grow into fortified towns. Why did these dramatic changes take place at this time, and what is the relationship between these two phenomena? The chapter reviews the evidence and evaluates the various possible explanations for such widespread abandonments, including climate change, nomadization, incentives to move to other regions, forced resettlement, death, and security (external threats), and concludes that the first phase of this abandonment could have only been a result of an external threat (the second phase of the abandonment will be discussed in subsequent chapters, and especially Excursus 12.1). The chapter then identifies the threat with the Philistines, analyzes the nature of Philistine–Israelite interaction, and assesses the impact of the Philistine pressure on social complexity in the highlands and the emergence of leaders there. This is also the phase in which the first Iron Age fortifications appear in the highlands. Taken together, these changes signify the emergence of the Israelite monarchy toward the end of the Iron Age I and the transition into the Iron II.

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

The chapter examines the growth of German cities and patterns of social differentiation within them, and municipal government.

The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

Chapter 1 draws on settlement archaeology, urban infrastructures, and architecture to evaluate the hypothesis that Chang’an was an unprecedented imperial capital at the apex of the junxian system. Also subject to appraisal is the role of interregional networks and urban nodes in the spatial reworking of contentious territories into the constitution of an imperial core.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

This chapter addresses the myth that rural America is a relic of history and that rural contributions to society are no longer as critical as they once were. This chapter argues that rural America is the current and future site of essential national amenities and services. These underappreciated rural amenities include agricultural land and clean energy production, as well as rural regions’ status as the national safety net for a society that will need to migrate inland from the coasts where much of the population is concentrated today. The chapter makes the case that agricultural land, clean energy production, and rural infrastructure should be treated as commons resources, stewarded for our society’s collective benefit. Reconceptualizing rural America as a commons helps provide broad normative guidance for the challenging governance task of reconciling local entitlement to rural resources alongside regional and national entitlement to them. The chapter proposes five principles that would help better govern rural America as a more resilient commons, including recognizing more rural work as work in the public interest, building capacity to avoid boom–bust cycles, democratizing rural resources, pursuing racial justice as central to resilience, and recognizing that investing in rural infrastructure benefits society as a whole.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

Urban and rural Chinese followed two different paths to improve their standards of living. Privileged by their household registration status, urban residents were able to enjoy windfalls from rising property prices that were largely unavailable to rural migrants. They also benefited from cheap services provided by rural migrants and government policies discriminating against rural migrants. Rural migrants were discriminated against because of their social status and relied on their own labor made cheap by the institutional arrangements.

This chapter revisits the three critical historical conditions that made China’s age of abundance possible: the Chinese population, the history of the Cultural Revolution, and the leader Deng Xiaoping. It sets China’s economic prosperity within a historical perspective and argues that such a chapter is not repeatable and cannot be sustained. The chapter lists four headwinds as China moves out of its age of abundance: unfinished urbanization, rising incomes and wealth inequality, population aging, and the return of the state’s omnipresent control.

This chapter concentrates on the two critical phases of China’s economic boom, both based on initiatives from the grassroots of society. The first phase was the rural labor force moving into non-farming jobs, with the rise of rural industries (township and village enterprises), and the second was rural-to-urban migration, with rural migrants working on manufacturing production lines and in construction in cities. It demonstrates that China’s economic boom was largely a bottom-up process, led by initiatives of the population, in particular the rural population, who made up to 80 percent of the total population at the start of this process.