Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

With state formation, however, came competition and conquest by rivals. The culmination of antiquity was not the small city-states of the classical Greek period but their amalgamation into a vast universal empire, first pioneered in history by the Assyrians and Achaemenids, but kicked into an even higher gear by the Romans and the Qin-Han dynasty. At the beginning of the common era, this type of polity dominated Afro-Eurasia in a band stretching from its Eastern to its Western extremes. Sometimes historians have looked to the nomads of the Central Asian steppe as a connecting element of pre-colonial history. But for most of the time, they were too feeble and ephemeral a presence to determine the shape of world history. Looking for immediate long-distance connections, the inspiration of modern globalization, has made ancient historians overlook the major parallel development across Eurasia: universal empires. This chapter situates the formation of the Roman empire and its driving dynamics within this wider arena of universal imperial monarchies, ruled by ‘divine’ kings of kings, governed by aristocratic and gentrified elites and based on a fiscal logic of low protection costs.

The beginnings of geographical writings in Graeco-Roman and Han-Chinese culture were subject to divergent perspectives on the natural environment. While ancient Chinese views were typically land-based, the Mediterranean Sea invited a maritime perspective. From the works of early Greek traveling writers, the exercise of geographia (literally ‘description of the earth’) was therefore inspired by principles and practices of circumnavigation, including the detailing of distances and orientation toward topographical features. In China, on the contrary, under the heading of xing fa, an evolving body of geographical manuals focused foremost on shapes and forms, including those of humans, objects, or provinces. Luke Habberstad undertakes the comparative analysis of two authors whose works are commonly considered emblematic of the genre of geographical literature in both civilizations: Strabo of Amaseia (first century BCE/CE), author of an influential Geography, and Ban Gu (first century CE), whose “Treatise on Geography” (“dili zhi”) became an influential precedent for imperial histories compiled in later dynasties. Habberstad’s discussion of authorship, text, and context makes it obvious that Strabo and Ban Gu differed widely in structure and focus. What united their perspectives, however, is that they were situated at analogous historical moments in the trajectory of their respective civilizations, namely, unprecedented highpoints of geographical extent and administrative organization. Literary encounters with space were thus intimately intertwined with ideas about cultural advancement. Expanding on this observation, Habberstad demonstrates that ancient geography, as encapsulated in the works of Strabo and Ban Gu, was not primarily and certainly not exclusively concerned with natural phenomena, but resonated mostly with the imperial milieus and their performative capacities to administer the vast expanse of empire.

This chapter explores further the material and imperial bases of popular sovereignty by tracking the entanglements between socialist and imperialist discourse. White labor activists in the Anglo world borrowed from imperial scripts to mark nonwhite migrants as a threat while demanding their own incorporation, which solidified settler projects. These demands depended on the continuous extreme exploitation of non-white workers at home and abroad and – while part of an imperial transnational imagination – resulted in the absorption of imperial labor control functions by national systems of migration control. The encounter between capitalists interested in accessing cheap labor by racialized subjects, elite projects invested in sheltering white settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition converged in founding moments of the people in the metropole. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice over labor solidarity created segregated labor spaces that fit with both capitalist goals of labor control and reinforced settler colonialism. The analysis recasts immigration as a central historical force that shaped and sustained racial capitalism and democratic politics in the core, making the case for its more serious theorization and incorporation into critical theory frameworks.

The emergence of a Mongol state in succession to the Kereyit khanate led to the creation of the largest land-based empire in history and a new people. The Mongols and their partners deployed and elaborated shared steppe political traditions that valued trade and customized the resources of both steppe and sedentary worlds. Under Chinggis Khan’s successor Ögödei, the mission of sacred world conquest and the ideology, governing mechanisms, and fiscal policies that enabled the attainment of this mission achieved sturdy articulation. Chinggisid priorities engendered massive demographic dislocation and transfers of peoples, and new patterns of commerce to support a robust imperial culture of consumption, patronage, and display. Early qa’ans’ ideological prerogatives and attempts to assert tighter control over resources inevitably clashed with their kinfolk’s customary claims. Tensions erupted into open civil war in 1260, but the new Chinggisid communicative space across Eurasia survived the breakup of the United Empire.

This study seeks to explain how the Mongol imperial space was created and administrated by the Mongols and conceived by the Mongols and their subjects mainly in Yuan China and Ilkhanid Iran. It stresses the interplay between the Mongols’ universal vision, their construction of a “Chinggisid space,” and the revival of “glocal” (i.e., local with global characteristic) spatial concepts in Mongol-ruled China and Iran. It starts by reviewing Mongol expansion, analyzing the reasons for its unprecedented success and the impact of its halt, and concludes in assessing the impact of the Mongol Empire on the shaping of the post-Mongol imperial space across Eurasia.