Ebook: Contention and Trust in Cities and States

Cities and nation-states have co-existed uneasily throughout human history. At times fused, at other times opposed, at still other times hierarchically linked, they have been crucibles of identity and social and political action. Today’s globalization re-elevates the importance of cities, but contrary to what is often claimed, also sustains the importance of nation-states in transformed ways. Contention and Trust in Cities and States explores cities and nation-states throughout history and around the world, bringing together the research of top scholars. It takes as a jumping-off point the work of the late Charles Tilly, but proceeds varied topics ranging from how today’s drug cartels undermine nation-states to how cities, nation-states, and empires treated religious minorities in the middle of the last millennium. Threaded throughout are themes of city-state relations, trust networks and commitment, democracy and inequality, and the importance of historical legacies in shaping state structures, practices, and capacities. Political scientists, sociologists, geographers, urbanists, historians and others concerned with how power and trust play out in cities and nation-states will find this a provocative and valuable collection.

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The catalyst for this book is the fact that noted sociologist Charles Tilly, upon his death in 2008, left one completed chapter of an unfinished manuscript entitled “Cities, States, and Trust Networks,” examining the relationships between cities and nation-states over the sweep of history, and in particular the role of trust networks in mediating this relationship.  Though this was the catalyst, the book serves a broader purpose: to survey recent frontier work on cities, nation-states, and the relations between the two in historical and contemporary perspective. Essays in the book will address four main themes: city-state relations, trust networks and commitment, democracy and inequality, and the importance of historical legacies in shaping state structures, practices, and capacities.  They will be global in scope, with research on the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa; a number of the pieces will be comparative.  They will also be interdisciplinary, including works of geography, history, political science, sociology, urban planning. The book addresses several confluent needs of readers.  One is to simply update themes addressed in earlier edited work such as Bringing the State Back In (1985).  A second is to bring together current thinking about cities on the one hand and nation-states on the other, literatures that are often segregated from each other.  A third is to perform those two purposes in a way that is global in scope and combines both historical and current analyses, to pull together insights from the full range of human experience.