598Chapter 30The twentieth century saw the trend toward urban-
ization continue. By 1950 the majority of the popula-
tion of western and central Europe lived in cities.
Metropolitan Paris (the region containing the city and
its suburbs) quadrupled in size during the twentieth
century, growing from 2.3 million people in 1900 to 8.7
million in 1991. Yet Paris is far from the most dramatic
example. Milan grew nearly tenfold, from 493,000 in
1900 to 4.7 million in 1991; Moscow, center of the
post–World War II communist empire, went from less
than 1 million to more than 10 million (see table 30.2).
Despite the dramatic urbanization seen in these fig-
ures, European growth was moderate compared with
the global trend. No longer are London and Paris the
largest cities on Earth; London ranked seventeenth in
1991, Paris nineteenth. Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo,
and Seoul are nearly twice the size of London or Paris.
No European city (and only one American city, New
York) ranks in the world’s ten largest cities. In many
ways, the European city representative of global trends
is Athens, which has exploded from a national capital
of 111,000 in 1900 to a rambling metropolitan region
of 3.7 million in 1991, nearly 50 percent of the Greek
population. (By comparison, Paris contains 15 percent
of the population of France.)
Twentieth-century European urbanization, like so
many historic patterns, has not been the same in west-
ern and eastern Europe. On the eve of World War II,
the population of Romania was still 82 percent rural, a
figure more typical of the eighteenth century in west-
ern or central Europe. As late as 1970, Hungary and
Romania remained less than 50 percent urban. Even in
1985 Albania, Yugoslavia, and Romania were still less
than 50 percent.
Urbanization has not been the only important
trend in European population migration. The twentieth
century began with Europe losing millions of people
through emigration to other parts of the world. Be-
tween 1871 and 1914, Sweden lost 1.5 million emi-
grants—chiefly to the United States—which
accounted for more than one-third of the population of
Sweden in 1870. Over that same time period, more
than 3.2 million people (chiefly Irish) left Great Britain;
the richest state in the world lost nearly 8 percent of its
1901 population to emigration. More than 2 million
people (chiefly Jews) fled Russia during the revolution
of 1905 and its aftermath. Italian population loss was
perhaps the most striking. In the early 1880s Italy lost a
million people every five years; by the early 1890s Italy
was losing a million people every three years; and in
the first decade of the twentieth century, a million more
people left Italy every eighteen months. By 1913 the
rate of Italian exiles had reached nearly 900,000 per
year. This meant that Italy was losing 2.5 percent of its
total population every year, roughly the equivalent to
losing the entire population of Rome (542,000), Venice
(161,000), and Florence (135,000) annually.
The twentieth century thus began with Europe los-
ing 1.3 million people per year. Some fled to avoid reli-
gious persecution, others to avoid conscription intoIllustration 30.1
Urbanization.The concentration of
population in large metropolitan regions,
which had begun in late eighteenth-
century Britain and had characterized
many regions in the nineteenth century,
continued throughout the twentieth cen-
tury. At the start of the century, Europe
contained half a dozen congested cities
of more than one million population.
This 1910 photograph of central Lon-
don shows what congestedmeant before
the automobile dominated cities.