The hubs of global history, ^16th-18th : Crossroads and meeting places

The 2016-2017 lecture series was devoted to the question of the place of cities in the global history of early modernity. We chose to focus on cities that played the role of " hub ", as part of an extensive and dispersed system. It was therefore necessary to start with a number of theoretical points of reference, drawn either from sociology or economics (and location theory). Among the most important works, we cited the universalist texts of German economist August Lösch (1906-1945), author of the seminal Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft. But our attention was mainly focused on the culturalist writings of Max Weber, in particular his distinction between the historical evolution of the city in the West and elsewhere. However, we have pointed out that Weber's historical conception has been the subject of much criticism, coming, for example, from historians specializing in the Muslim world. In his writings, André Raymond has demonstrated the curious complicity between part of the Weberian tradition and the " orientalist " tradition on the question of urbanism, represented by researchers such as Jean Sauvaget (1901-1950), Professor at the Collège de France. From this point of view, " The "Muslim" city did not acquire the communal institutions that ensured the development of the medieval city. It is not administered. Why should we be surprised ? "The status of cities", notes Jean Sauvaget, in a famous article on Damascus, "is not the subject of any particular provision of Islamic law. There are no longer any municipal institutions... The city is no longer considered as an entity, as a being in itself, complex and alive : it is now no more than a meeting of individuals with contradictory interests, who, each in his own sphere, act on their own behalf" ". The conclusion of this discussion seems almost inevitable, as Raymond  ironizes: " The city is only a non-city, Muslim urbanism [is] only a non-urbanism. " Similar writings on the city can easily be found in China, India or pre-Columbian America, hence the need to compare these generalizations from classical historiography with recent work in the field of global history.