False Economy - Alan Beattie [26]
Similarly, Cordoba, a great trading center of the Moors, reached a population in the eleventh century that, according to some estimates, no other European city would match until the seventeenth. Weakening itself by breaking into a series of internal struggles, the Moorish civilization was subject to Christian invasion and "reconquest" from the north, whereupon its cities shrank. The job was completed when the Hapsburg empire took over southern Spain and taxed its cities to fund wars against the French and others. Cordoba shrank to a seventh of its former size.
Such urban reversal, certainly in absolute numbers, is unusual. More typically, government and public reaction help shape the speed and fashion in which cities get larger and in which populations as a whole urbanize. And even those countries adopting policies to discourage rural flight are generally trying to smooth the transition, not to stand in the way of history.
Conveniently enough for the comparative historian, the British Isles, one of the pioneers of modern urbanization, have displayed three markedly different models of managing the move: the careful, the reckless, and the brutal.
In England the change was gradual and relatively painless. Like much of Western Europe, England had started generating significant surpluses in agriculture by the eleventh or twelfth century, and the process of consolidating small-scale agriculture into larger and more efficient farms could begin. But the "enclosure" by landowners of open ground or of strip farms, where individual peasants tilled sections of collectively held land, took several centuries. Responding to popular protests and occasionally outright rebellion, and after warnings from the Church, the monarchs of the Tudor family in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries slowed the process with a series of "enclosure acts" to placate protesting villagers. Later, country-dwellers often voluntarily moved to towns when industrialization created better jobs and better prospects in textile mills and the like.
In Scotland, however, both the crown and the landowners paid less heed to their small farmers. In 1745, the king's armies crushed the "Jacobite" rebellion that tried to install a Scottish Catholic, Charles Edward Stuart (variously known as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Young Pretender) on the English throne. The crown subsequently viciously suppressed any sign of dissent from Scotland, leading landowners to care relatively more about London and themselves and less about their tenants. When the gains in profitability from turning over scattered small plots to large sheep and cattle farms became apparent, the change was abrupt. The result was the Lowland and Highland Clearances, the forced removal of tenant farmers to make way for bigger and more productive farms that began in the eighteenth century with no powerful monarchs standing in the way. The Clearances inundated Scotland's big cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, with indigent refugees.
And in Ireland there was an even greater indifference on the part of the government and its local satraps. Many of the landlords were absentee English Protestants who were physically, religiously, and socially distant from their Catholic tenants. The change, accordingly, took place in a way that in practice, if not intent, resembled genocide. Famines followed a disastrous potato harvest and mass land evictions in the mid-nineteenth century. Two million of the Irish peasants who survived, out of a prefamine population of about nine million, rapidly emigrated, many farther afield to the cities of Liverpool, Boston, and New York.
Evidently, urbanization works better, and the creation of cities is more peaceful and constructive, if there is a high ratio of urban pull to rural push. These lessons in how to urbanize are currently being tested not over decades and centuries but over years and, sometimes, months. The growth that took a century in cities like London is taking a quarter of that in the fast-rising cities of Asia, and the time frame continues