Book Review

Comparative/World

Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century North African historian, theorized that towns developed when and wherever humans took up agriculture. The most fundamental mission of towns, in his imagining of human history, was not as hubs of commerce or purveyors of culture but rather to provide security for peasants from the depredations of either horse or camel-mounted nomads. That threat necessitated the construction of a surrounding wall to protect those within from those without. From his study of his region's often violent past, ibn Khaldun reached the theoretical, and he thought universal, conclusion that a town simply could not survive for long without a wall to guard it.

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The essays in this volume, edited by James D. Tracy, confirm that his logic was indeed shared by many as townspeople across centuries and around the globe expended both ingenuity and money in the construction of bigger, and hopefully less easily assailable, enceintes. The contributions by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt and Edward Farmer inform us that walls encircled Chinese cities almost from the dawn of history and that the Chinese character cheng can be read as both "wall" and "city," confirming ibn Khaldun's assumption that the two were inseparable. Richard Kagan's fascinating discussion of the "spiritual walls" of colonial Latin American cities suggests that the impulse to wall was not entirely universal. But for most of human history, it took a confidence born of religious conviction to leave a town open to its potential enemies. The defensive role of cities has often taken a back seat to issues of commerce, social organization, political elites, and cultural consumption in more recent urban historians' reconstruction of the past. This volume compels the reader to revisit the strategic and defensive roles of cities, which were undoubtedly at the forefront in the minds of those who built the walls. Simply put, urban life for much of human history would not have flourished without walls.

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