Quote:
Walter Scheidel (Stanford University)
"Hansen defines the city-state as ‘a highly institutionalized and highly centralized micro-state consisting of one town (often walled) with its immediate hinterland and settled with a stratified population, of whom some are citizens, some foreigners, and sometimes, slaves. Its territory is so small that the urban center can be reached in a day’s walk or less, and the politically privileged part of its population is so small that it does in fact constitute a face-to-face society. The population is ethnically affiliated with the population of neighboring city-states, but political identity is focused on the city-state itself and based on differentiation from other city-states. The city-state is a self-governing but not necessarily independent political unit.’23 This is necessarily an ideal type, and not all features apply in equal measure to all specimens. Even so, in terms of general trends, city-states tend to be associated with a number of historically distinctive features, one of which is republicanism. While many city-states – indeed probably the majority – were monarchies, a number of them were not, or moved from monarchical to republican regimes, most of them oligarchies but sometimes democratic. Examples include ancient Greece, Etruria, Latium, medieval Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Mzab in Algeria, Swahili city-states on the coast of East Africa, Ibadan of the Yoruba, and Banda-Neira of the Malay.24 Moreover, even in monarchical city-states, voting councils and deliberative assemblies are frequently attested, as in Sumer, Assyria, Phoenicia, the Viking city-states in Ireland, Swahili states, the Niger Delta, and Spring-and-Autumn China.25
As noted, such institutions are more likely to thrive in micro-states (all city-states necessarily start out as micro-states). They are also likely to be associated with strong concepts of citizenship and popular military mobilization.26 All these features – political involvement, military commitments, and citizenship – are logically related, albeit to varying degrees: thus, for specific historical reasons, some city-states appear to have lacked a clear notion of citizenship or an element of popular governance, such as the Aztec city-states that built a huge empire. For present purposes, I focus more narrowly on a few cases that correspond most closely to the ideal or trend type of a conjuncture of republicanism, popular political and military mobilization, and citizen status. These entities may best be defined as ‘citizen-city-states’ in order to distinguish them from the more generic concept of ‘city-states’. While all or most early republican states appear to have been city-states, not all city-states were republics. Citizen-city-states represent a sub-set of all city-states in which the favorable preconditions for republicanism that were latently present in all city-states had in fact led to this particular outcome. Only a very few of these citizen-city-states acquired empires (which might rather clumsily be referred to as ‘citizen-city-state empires’): Athens, Carthage, Rome, Genoa and Venice (if we classify the mature dogate as a de facto oligarchy) are the principal cases. It is my contention that it is necessary to consider the imperial development of polities such as the Roman Republic in this highly specific context in order to appreciate the circumstances that accounted for their institutional structures."
anyone who had any comment will be appriciated!
