Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present Reprint Edition

.. but an excellent book nonetheless. From the title, I expected a lot more discussion and history of economic development, but it was a straight thistory of urban development. After having read dozens of other histories, I still learned a lot from this book. Thsi is one I will definitely keep in my library.

I don't have time at the moment to give this marvelous book a full review, but I was so upset at seeing this minor masterpiece get an undeserved two star rating that I decided to jump in quickly to try and balance the rating. This really is a five star book. Sadlg, much of Bairoch's best work has never been translated into English, which breaks my heart because my French is pretty much limited to asking for directions or figuring out the rough title of a book. Even better than this is his ECONOMICS AND WORLD HISTORY, which is academic writing as good as it ever gets. If you were to limit yourself to ten books on economics in your lifetime, that book should be one of the ten.

This book is very frequently cited by authors in the areas of urban history and urban economics. For the life of me, I cannot understand why. I've read (actually, forced my way through) about half of it. I found it to be verbose and superficial -- at base a list of the rankings of city sizes at different points throughout history. There is no real attempt to do what the title suggests, i.e., show how cities are linked with economic development.