Urbanism and economic development in a pre-industrial context: the case of southern Russia

Russia's southern frontier in the seventeenth century was continuously menaced by the nomadic Tatars who inhabited the open steppe grasslands. In this situation the Russian government attempted to harness all the frontier's sources to the cause of defence by founding a series of military towns which could control and direct the process of settlement. Government control, however, did not extend to the widespread illegal migration and settlement of runaway serfs. In a later period, as the Tatar threat subsided and colonization continued, the importance of most of the towns diminished and a system of secondary central places arose as trade expanded. But the oldest towns retained their importance in this changing social and economic situation, becoming higher-order central places for long-distance trade and, increasingly, centres for agricultural processing.     

In Search of Causality: A Regional Approach to Urban Growth in Eighteenth-century England

The simple equation of industrialisation and urbanisation contains much truth: recent national surveys confirm that rapid coal-based industrial growth spawned massive urban development in Britain. And yet at the local level a wide diversity of growth experiences reflect a complex and overlapping nexus of growth stimuli which defy attempts at generalisation. In taking a regional perspective, this paper seeks to occupy a productive middle ground in this ongoing debate. Placing urban growth in north-west England into its real economic and geographical context, it recognises the complexities of urban growth but transcends the narrowness of the particular. In so doing, it challenges some of the certainties of industrial urbanisation, emphasising instead the importance of rural industry, urban commercial functions and inter-place linkages. Most fundamentally, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of the geography of causality.