Like ritual cities, administrative cities were the habitations of the state rulers. Their major cultural role was to serve as the locus of state administration. State offices and officers had an urban location, from which they exercised a political control and economic exploitation of the surrounding rural areas quite unknown in ritual cities. Administrative cities also had a qualitatively different demographic and social complexity. They contained large populations, densely settled, often ethnically varied, with heterogeneous occupations. Such cities were nodes of communication and transportation and centres of commerce, crafts, and other economic functions for the surrounding countryside.

Administrative cities occurred in agrarian empires, state-level societies associated with the early civilizations of Hindu and Muslim India, China, and Egypt, as well as the Mamlūk Middle East, Tokugawa Japan, Alexandrine Greece, and other expansive territorial states before the advent of the world capitalist system. These states had rulers with great powers of political coercion, which they used to maintain a high level of inequality in wealth between the state ruling elite and the primary producers, the peasantry. This type of urban culture rested on how effectively the state could exploitatively control peasant agricultural productivity for maintaining the elite. The urban administrative cultural role was the major means to this end.

The administrative city brought together the political, economic, transport, and communications functions and institutions necessary for this rural rapine. For just as the state elite preyed on the peasant, so the administrative city’s flamboyant architecture and monumental public works ultimately rested on what could be taken from the rice paddies of the Japanese cultivator or the wheat field of the Indian peasant. There also grew up urban populations that converted the wealth taxed from the rural area into a sumptuous life-style for the urban-resident state elite: artisans and artists, of various levels of reputation. This gave rise to the poor of the city and, often, institutions to help govern and subdue them, such as municipal governments. Merchants also were necessary to convert the peasant’s grain payments into cash. Administrative cities commonly tried to restrain the wealth of urban merchants from fear that such riches might be converted into political power.

As the links between coercive state and oppressed peasant grew stronger (that is, as the two became more unequal), the urban cultural practices (for the elite) became more separated from those of the countryside. The urban area concentrated a sophistication, an elaboration of custom and ideology that marked it off from the rural, which now was defined as rustic. Alongside the elaborate, the monumental, and the beautiful, which distinguished the administrative city’s architecture, elite entertainments, and general cultural forms from those of the countryside, however, there was also an overwhelming poverty in the city’s artisan and servant wards.

The administrative city had some of the properties commonly attributed to cities: it was a locale for cultural elaboration and monumental building, a repository of great wealth but also of extensive poverty, and a heterogeneous locale, both occupationally and in terms of ascriptive identities based on ethnicity, religion, caste, or race. But it was not disorganized or impersonal. Family, guild, and ethnic group framed the allegiances that defined the basic unit of urban cultural practice, the city quarter, which for the urban nonelite functioned with many of the characteristic cohesions of the peasant village.

The mercantile city

Mercantile cities appeared at the geographic margins or at times of dissolution of agrarian empires—for example, in medieval and early modern Europe, after a decentralized feudalism had fully replaced the Roman Empire. This urban type is thus a variant form that appeared, under particular conditions, in the urban cultures that also contained administrative cities. The mercantile city’s links with the wider culture were disjunctive rather than, as with the administrative city, supportive. A class of powerful and wealthy merchants not completely beholden to the state rulers grew up in such cities and, left unchecked, could grow strong enough to effectively challenge the state rulers. This merchant class, and the mercantile cities it occupied, depended for their wealth and political autonomy on the profits of international trade, moneylending, or investment in cash cropping of export agricultural commodities (as, for example, vineyards and olive groves in the Mediterranean). The city produced wealth and capital in its own right rather than simply sucking it from rural agriculture. Such wealth provided an avenue for political power separate from that offered by the revenues derived from the peasantry. Often, therefore, urban magnates and state power holders or rural gentry stood in strong opposition, each trying to control—or absorb—the wealth and power of the other.

Mercantile cities varied in the extent of legal, fiscal, and martial autonomy they enjoyed. At their most developed, they conformed to the definitions of “true” cities provided by Weber and Pirenne. They enjoyed independent municipal government, sported urban fortifications, fielded citizen armies, and even subdued surrounding rural magnates. In less developed (generally earlier) mercantile cities, urban independence was not so great: for example, urban trading capital depended on intermarriage with rural magnates or came from rural moneylending. Even in such cases, however, rural resources were put to novel uses in the urban setting.

The cultural role of mercantile cities grew out of their independent economic productivity and their political autonomy. They played a very strong heterogenetic role. They were strongholds of a merchant class and other social strata based on acquired wealth, against the landed aristocracy of the agrarian empire. Because they were often under attack from the aristocracy, these cities came to symbolize freedom and social mobility: “city air makes one free.” Being embattled, mercantile cities also became bastions of cultural innovation. Urban cultural form emphasized achievement, and urban politics involved shifting factional alignments. Given the volatility of commercial operations, leading families rose and fell rapidly, and plutocracies, quite fluid in membership, came to rule these cities. The poor artisans and small traders too were more independent than in administrative cities, and through occupational or sectarian associations, like guilds, they demanded and won political concessions.

Although places of innovation, achievement, freedom, and mobility—traits that they share with industrial cities—mercantile cities were neither impersonal nor secular. The extended family was the major institution organizing business firms, political coalitions, and much elite social life. Other corporate institutions, like guilds and religious fraternities, joined city dwellers into highly personalized, ritualized associations that downplayed individualism and secularism in the city.

Given the commercial conditions and the difficult class oppositions that set the cultural context for mercantile cities, they proved evanescent and fragile, usually reverting under state intervention to administrative cities, in which the merchant magnates and their wealth came under the control of state rulers.