376 Ch. 10 • Eighteenth-Century Economic And Social Change

Table 10.2. Europe s Largest Cities at the End of the Eighteenth
Century

City Population

London 950,000

Paris 550,000

Naples 430,000

Constantinople 300,000

Moscow 300,000

City Population

St. Petersburg 270,000

Vienna 230,000

Amsterdam 220,000

Lisbon 180,000

Berlin 170,000

capital in search of opportunity. Indians and blacks had also begun to

appear in the imperial capital.

Some contemporaries believed that wickedness and crime increased

almost inevitably with larger cities and towns. In the case of London, the

book Hell Upon Earthy or the Town in an Uproar (1729) was subtitled “The

Late Horrible Scenes of Forgery, Perjury, Street-Robbery, Murder, Sodomy,

and Other Shocking Impieties.” It denounced “this great, wicked,

unwieldy, over-grown Town, one continued hurry of Vice and Pleasure,

where nothing dwells but Absurditiesy Abusesy Accidentsy Accusations.”

London’s emerging social geography reflected the paradox that Britain

was both an aristocratic and commercial society. Bloomsbury Square and

Bedford Square, elite districts in West London, near Westminster, the seat

of Parliament, were largely aristocratic creations, as nobles developed some

of their land. At the same time, commercial London also expanded rapidly

along with the British Empire. Near the burgeoning docks of the East End

on the River Thames, dilapidated buildings housed the poor.

As England’s economic dynamism began to shift northward with increased

manufacturing, Liverpool, a teeming port on the Irish Sea, “the emporium of

the western world,” and Manchester, a northern industrial town, developed

rapidly. By 1800, Manchester had become the “metropolis of manufactures,”

with 75,000 inhabitants and growing industrial suburbs.

Continental cities, too, added population. In France, the growth of Paris,

above all, but also Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, and other cities was deceptive, as

only about 10 percent of the population lived in towns of more than 5,000

people in 1789, compared to 25 percent in England. In the German states,

there had been but twenty-four towns with more than 10,000 people in

1500; by 1800, there were sixty of them. In Berlin, royal officials, lawyers,

and soldiers accounted for about 40 percent of the Prussian capital’s

140,000     inhabitants in 1783. In southern Italy, Naples was barely able to

support its impoverished population of more than 400,000 people. No

other town in southern Italy had 10,000 inhabitants. In Rome, the clergy

constituted about half the population of 160,000 people. East Central and

Eastern Europe and the Balkans had relatively few cities. In the middle of

the eighteenth century, only three cities within the vast Russian Empire