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The article presents information on cities and towns in global context. Use of the concept global city did not necessarily figure in the early writings on cities, but international market connections and trade linkages did. In its initial incarnation, American urban sociology was remarkable for its failure to contextualize urban questions in larger political and economic processes be they global or otherwise. This may have owed partly to the peculiar geographical circumstances of their home nation. The extensive size of the U.S. and the decentralized character of American politics meant that scholars who were interested in connecting the growth of cities to trade or market dynamics generally studied them in a regional or even sub-regional context, a set of concerns that were articulated through the development of central place theory, among others. The historical legacies of colonialism do more than shed light on the timing of much of this literature in the period of post-colonial independence; they also help explain why, in contrast to their American counterparts, few European urbanists sought to blame poverty and underdevelopment in third-world cities on personal pathologies or cultural attributes.
