Paris

Paris, like all global cities, plays an essential role in configuring the historical and spatial possibilities of global processes. Moreover, these processes are not as recent as some of the literature on globalization implies. Paris is no exception to the historical pattern of global cities in that it has served as a structural force in organizing “world” spatial frames for more than a millennium. Employing Fernand Braudel's distinction between a world economy (an economically [politically and culturally] autonomous section of the planet providing internal links and organic unity) and the world economy (“the market of the universe” and “the human race” as a whole), one may argue that Paris has played a structural role in a world economy since the Middle Ages and has emerged as a central site in the emergence of the world economy since the 18th century.

Paris was founded as part of the Roman urban network, but until the end of the first millennium, the city was located on the periphery of a Mediterranean world that nourished Eurasian commerce and culture. Paris was pushed further into the corner of a Eurasian economic and cultural system by the rise of an Islamic world in the seventh and eighth centuries that pushed northwestern Europe out of the vibrant trade of the Mediterranean, western Asia, and the Indian Ocean. In the high Middle Ages, however, Paris slowly moved back into the center of a European renaissance through its role as a strong political capital (11th and 12th centuries) and through the founding of the university (13th century) whose four colleges drew students and intellectuals from as far away as Greece and Scandinavia. But the emergence of Paris as a structural center of a world economy took place with the French kings’ victory in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) and the Italian Wars that followed. Gaining passage toward the Mediterranean [Page 1293]and control of the northern continental portion of the Atlantic coast, Paris was increasingly integrated into the vibrant shift from Mediterranean to Atlantic commerce. Following the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and the subsequent division of Europe into sovereign territories organized around political and economic capitals, Paris became an intellectual, economic, and political center of an Atlantic world that slowly transformed itself into the world economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the settlement of colonies in the Americas and the development of the trading triangle across the Atlantic, Paris remained second to Amsterdam and London, but the city served nonetheless as a point of accumulation for resources brought in from four continents. It was also in the city of Paris and its near suburb, Versailles, that the French kings entertained diplomatic and political figures from throughout Europe. By the time of the French Revolution of 1789, Paris and its immediate suburbs were one of the dominant cultural, political, and economic centers of the Atlantic world.

The 19th century marked a turning point in the history of Paris as a world city. As colonial expansion shifted into imperialism, Paris found itself at the heart of an empire that spread from the Caribbean to North Africa into Indochina and the South Pacific. In this context, an economic and political world centered on Paris shifted toward the world economy, making Paris one of the economic, political, and cultural hubs of a vast imperial system centered in western Europe. The reconstruction of Paris during the 19th century, especially under Napoleon III and Georges-Eugene Haussmann, is best understood as a process of bringing order to an economic, cultural, and political accumulation generated through Paris's economic and cultural place in the colonially driven world. Karl Marx, sitting among many intellectual exiles in Paris in the 1840s, observed the Parisian proletariat and was convinced that Paris would be at the center of an international revolution that would spread across the globe. It was this period that gave Paris its famous title “capital of the 19th century.”

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