A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures: An Investigation Conducted by the Copenhagen Polis Centre (review)

This massive tome develops and defends the ideal types of city-states and city-state cultures, constructs that allow comparative analysis of diverse regions of the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds. At the outset, I should state that a proper evaluation of the utility of these ideal types would require a specialist in urban history, archaeology, and/or the ancient world, which I am not. I approached this text as an occasional teacher of global history with a research interest in sixteenth-century Mexico. Though not able to pass definitive judgment on the central contentions of this book, I can summarize its main argument, note its contributions, and suggest some limitations that could well become part of future debates.

The Copenhagen Polis Centre is a research institute with a two-fold agenda. The first is "to produce a comprehensive inventory of all known Arabic and classical Greek poleis including colonies" (9). The second goal, achieved with this volume, has been to "make a comparative study" of all city-states in world history. The comparison hinges on the ideal type of the "city-state culture" (9). Hansen provides a fifteen-point definition of "city-state culture," though he is careful to note that his definition is not absolute. Key features include shared language and cultures, "a large number of small political communities of a common type, which today we call ‘city-states,'" as well as a certain amount of regional integration. The hope of the Copenhagen Polis Institute is that this definition can usefully facilitate comparative study.

With this goal, the institute sponsored a symposium bringing together scholars from the disciplines of history, philology, theology, archaeology, anthropology, and sociology, ultimately including forty-two scholars from fifteen countries. These scholars evaluated their regions of specialization according to the criteria of city-state culture as defined by Hansen. Several papers submitted to the symposium, along with additional essays sought from specialists in regions not originally represented in the symposium's proceedings, have now been published in the volume.

The net result is a substantial though highly specialized publication. The value of an "ideal type" is that it allows for comparison across time and space, and the Copenhagen Polis Centre has clearly achieved this goal. After a plausible linking of urbanization and the Neolithic revolution in the introduction, an extraordinary array of articles traces this process throughout virtually all of the world's regions. In terms of geographic scope, density of data, and bibliographic depth, this source will be a basic reference for years to come. For a nonspecialist in this area, this was the most useful aspect of the volume for me.

The text itself indicates the arguments of those who might take issue with this kind of grand synthesis. Intriguingly, in his symposium paper, Hansen notes, "All other city-state cultures are dwarfed by the ancient Greek city-state, the polis" (141), and then in the conclusion he attacks those (Joyce Marcus, Gary Fineman, et al.) who are critical of the concept of "city-state" because they see it as too narrowly linked to the classical Greek world (599). Others taking issue with the concept for being too rooted in a specific Western experience include "Chinese Marxists and Nigerian Islamic historians" (600). To some extent, these types of complaints reflect a tension between local specificity and larger-scale, perhaps even "global," social processes. They also demonstrate varied interpretive strategies among different scholarly communities. Despite the coherence of the Copenhagen Polis Institute volume, I do not expect these tensions to be reconciled anytime soon.

Of course, they need not be reconciled. Ideal types are useful because they allow comparison across time and space. Debate over the value of these specific ideal types—for example, whether it really...