This Fleeting World

Our World: The Modern Era 61
much as during the agrarian era. (That’s the equivalent of eating almost
1,000 candy bars a day!) A world of planes, rockets, and nuclear power
has replaced a world of horses, oxen, and wood fires.
City Sprawl
As populations have increased, so has the average size of human communities.
In 1500 about fifty cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants, and
none had more than a million.
By 2000 several thousand cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants,
about 411 had more than a million, and 41 had more than 5 million. (In
2007, the population of Shanghai, China, was estimated at almost 15.5
million.) During the agrarian era most people lived and worked in villages;
by the end of the twentieth century almost 50 percent of the world’s
population lived in communities of at least five thousand people. The rapid
decline of villages marked a fundamental transformation in the lives of
most people on Earth. As during the agrarian era, the increasing size of
Top Ten Cities of the Year 1500
Below is the ranking and population of the most populous cities
ranked back in 1500. The list of top ten cities some five hundred years
later still includes two of these cities, though the population is vastly
different—Beijing (8.7 million) and Istanbul (8.8 million).
1 Beijing, China 672,000
2 Vijayanagar, India 500,000
3 Cairo, Egypt 400,000
4 Hangzhou, China 250,000
5 Tabriz, Iran 250,000
6 Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey 200,000
7 Gaur, India 200,000
8 Paris, France 185,000
9 Guangzhou, China 150,000
10 Nanjing, China 147,000
Source: Chandler, T. (1987). Four thousand years of urban growth: An historical census
by Tertius Chandler. Lampeter, UK: St. David’s University Press.