Rereading Fernand Braudel recently, I came across two critical points he makes during his discussion of cities. We’ve previously discussed how cities show up where they are most convenient for commerce, production, or government control (and sometimes all three at once). But Braudel adds some lovely texture to that discussion.

First, he notes that in Europe, cities were often placed by rivers in order to take advantage of watermill power for production. Every inch of suitable riverbank was harnessed by mills, where possible (and where the riverbank was not already devoted to docks for the vast array of shipping needed to supply the city). If the site was not conducive to the growth of a city, the mill complex would become a standalone production site, such as ironworks or mines. But cities had several advantages as centers of production even before the Industrial Revolution, namely that they had lots of workers nearby and potentially had lots of customers, and easy access to the transportation networks for raw materials and the export of finished goods.

In a more abstract sense, you could say that cities grow where they can access enough power (plus food, another frequent topic of Braudel’s). If new ways to produce (and transport!) power emerge, expect to see new cities grow up that can make use of the new power availability to exploit opportunities that previously were out of reach.

Second, we noted that “administrative” cities often have little production of their own, and rely on constant government funding. Braudel (starting around pg. 530 of Structures of Everyday Life) gives us hard numbers of major European capitals, which were particularly prone to such tendencies, and they are quite astonishing.

Lavoisier, writing in the mid-1700s, estimated that the city of Paris spent some 260 million livres per year to support its populace—of which only 20 million came from commercial profits, while 140 million came from government salaries and bonds, and 100 million came from ground rents or from business activities conducted outside of the city.

Some 141,000 people lived in Berlin in 1783, of which some 33,000 were soldiers and their families, 13,000 bureaucrats-and-families, and 10,000 servants—in other words, over a third of the city was economically unproductive, spending salaries that came from tax revenue. Many of the remainder made their living solely by catering to the needs and tastes of the salaried class.

St. Petersburg, capital of imperial Russia, was even more lopsided. In 1789, it had about 220,000 inhabitants, more than two-thirds of whom were male. Soldiers, (military) sailors, and cadets (and their families) comprised some 55,000 people, over a quarter of the city. Large numbers of others were servants. And let us not forget the bureaucracy. The city itself was placed in a bad location for practical purposes, constantly dealing with bitter cold and floods that killed many every year, far away from its sources of food and even building material; but that was where Peter the Great wanted his court, due to the spectacular vistas it afforded. Consequently, vast sums of money were spent to build the city and keep it working.

None of this is bad, per se. If a country has the money and wants to spend it in a major city, good for it. But it does illustrate that the fortunes of such cities are inextricably tied to those of the government. Braudel notes that when the Mughals of India moved their capital city, practically the entire population of the old capital would move with them; they had no way to support themselves otherwise.

Braudel also points out, in an argument later echoed by Jane Jacobs, that when a capital city grows too large and lacks an independent commercial base, its elites end up bending government policy to favor the capital city at the expense of the rest of the country. Jacobs noted in particular that London favored policies that benefited its international banking business and impoverished the rest of Britain. Paris likewise became a massive megalopolis that drained wealth from the countryside.

(I note in passing that until recently, Washington DC and its environs were not a major urban powerhouse—that role was played by New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities able to counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of the capital. By 2011, however, that had changed. The region has become overrun by well-paid lobbyists, and to a lesser degree by financial and healthcare firms that benefit from easy access to regulators. This was probably a symptom, not a cause, of the growth of centralized policy; but once such people are ensconced, they continue to drum up business at the expense of the common citizen. See Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People [2012]. Matters have only become more exacerbated since he wrote.)

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)