The first and only monograph available on the subject, The Roman City and its Periphery offers a full and detailed treatment of the little-investigated aspect of Roman urbanism – the phenomenon of suburban development. Presenting archaeological and literary evidence alongside sixty-three plans of cities, building plans, and photographs, Penelope Goodman examines how and why Roman suburbs grew up outside Roman cities, what was distinctive about the nature of suburban development, and what contributions buildings and activities in the suburbs might make to the character and function of the city as a whole. With full bibliography and annotations throughout, this will not only provide a coherent treatment of an essential theme for students of Roman urbanism, but archaeologists, urban planners and geographers also, will have an excellent comparative tool in the study of modern urbanism.
This dissertation, entitled “Cities on the Periphery: Urbanization in Bithynia, Pontus, and Paphlagonia under the Roman Empire,” seeks to provide the first comprehensive urban history of the region during the period of Roman rule. Modern scholarship on this region has focused on cultural and political topics, including Greek reactions to Roman rule; provincial elites and euergetism; and urban life. This scholarship has ignored dramatic increases in the number of new settlements in north central Anatolia, urban and rural, as well as consistent vitality and even growth during the turbulent 3rd century CE. I address these lacunae and investigate the factors behind this growth and stability. I analyze the complexities of this development across four frameworks: the construction and finance of civic monuments, shifting settlement patterns, the extent of bulk and prestige goods networks, and integration into networks of administration, military affairs, and imperial ideology. The introductory first chapter documents the dramatic increases in the number of urban and rural settlements in the region and poses a set of key questions regarding urbanization, imperial intervention, and local stability. I then set out the methodology of my dissertation. I briefly review and critique previous scholarship on this region, which has focused mainly on cultural and political topics of urban and imperial life. I then indicate the advantages of shifting the focus to consider the diachronic nature of urbanization over the long term, the archaeological record, integration and connectivity, and interpretive questions that address the uniqueness of the region. My approach is highly interdisciplinary, making heavy use of evidence from archaeological surveys, epigraphic finds, and network theory, as well as ancient literary and historical accounts. The second chapter examines how local preferences and financial resources influenced the construction and use of civic monuments. The emphasis on Graeco-Roman cities as lived environments, not synchronic monumental landscapes, plays a critical role in this analysis. My discussion qualifies recent assertions that cities in the eastern empire expressed their Greek identity by building democratic monuments with public money. Monuments such as theaters and temples are clearly prioritized, yet cities also enthusiastically adopted monuments marked as Roman, such as baths, or used democratic structures for Roman entertainment. Though civic funds remained a consistent resource, the patronage of local elites and the emperor were essential in the 1st and later 3rd and 4th centuries, respectively. The third chapter synthesizes five decades of archaeological survey. I identify broad trends in expansion, size, and continuity from the Iron Age to the Late Roman period and assess the extent of Roman influence behind these fluctuations. Administrative, economic, and military priorities guided the efficient management of this region. This was achieved by the creation of a few new cites and by an extensive road network. Both constituted unique developments and indirectly encouraged the proliferation of small towns and villages, which benefitted from the demands of regional capitals and access to roads. This produced a balanced urban system that fashioned a robust administrative hierarchy, but that was relatively moderate in overall urban density. The fourth and fifth chapters discuss connectivity across a range of landscapes: city and hinterland, the Black Sea area, and the Mediterranean basin as a whole. The third chapter focuses on the circulation of staple goods and luxury items. This area was remarkably well integrated and even self-sufficient at the local and regional levels. Its position on the periphery of the Roman empire limited intensive contact with the broader Mediterranean, but encouraged intensive commercial relationships with the Black Sea, Armenia, and Syria. The fourth chapter also examines connectivity, but in the context of imperial administration, communication, and military activity. This project ultimately seeks to provide the first comprehensive synthesis of the urban history of north central Anatolia in the Roman period. Roman intervention and traditional urban ideals were early stimuli; as I argue, however, regional preferences, a geographical position on the Mediterranean periphery, and heightened imperial interests in the 3rd century were the most prominent influences on urban development and stability in north central Anatolia. The region occupied a unique geographical, political, and economic position within the Roman empire and it represents a compelling contrast to the urban character of other Roman provinces. I conclude by stressing the complexity of the urban development of this region as well as the strong role that local traditions and geographical position played in negotiating imperial interaction.
In What's in a Name? editors Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms have gathered together experts from around the world in order to provide a truly global framework for the study of the urban periphery.
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multi-directional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. Exploring subjects from the shores of the Russian Empire to nation-making in Latin America, the international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, centre and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies; rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context. Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centres and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history. As such, it will appeal to a wide variety of historians, including transnational, cultural and intellectual, and historians of early modern and modern periods.
The Roman City and its Periphery explores the issue of periurban development outside the cities of the Roman world: the first time the issue has been treated in a comprehensive volume. Through a wide range of case studies, ranging from Rome itself to provincial cities across the western part of the empire, Penny Goodman explores contemporary views of periurban development, and compares them with the reality of archaeological remains. At the core of the work is a detailed case study of the cities of Roman Gaul, from well-known major cities such as Arles to small towns like Argentomagus, and from the Roman conquest to the end of antiquity.
Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region’s contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.
The only monograph available on the subject, this book presents archaeological and literary evidence to provide students with a full and detailed treatment of the little-investigated aspect of Roman urbanism - the phenomenon of suburban development.
A passionate account of how the gulf between France’s metropolitan elites and its working classes are tearing the country apart Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an “American society”—one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on “the periphery.” As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.
Cities such as New York, Tokyo and London are the centres of transnational corporate headquarters, of international finance, transnational institutions, and telecommunications. They are the dominant loci in the contemporary world economy, and the influence of a relatively small number of cities within world affairs has been a feature of the shift from an international to a more global economy which took place during the 1970s and 1980s. This book brings together the leading researchers in the field to write seventeen original essays which cover both the theoretical and practical issues involved. They examine the nature of world cities, and their demands as special places in need of specific urban policies; the relationship between world cities within global networks of economic flows; and the relationship between world city research and world-systems analysis and other theoretical frameworks.
