This is an influential book about the emergence of urban areas before the advent of industrialization. Dr. Sjoberg
describes the developments that contributed to the concentration of human populations in relatively small areas
that were geographically removed from the fields in which food was produced, and which we would today recognize
as towns and cities. The most important of these was the development of technologies, particularly the cultivation
of high yield grains, that made possible the production of a food surplus and in turn permitted the specialization
of some of the members of a population in nonagricultural activities. A second key development was the discovery
of methods for alloying metals to produce weapons that were durable and effective enough to both permit the
subordination of large areas to economic exploitation and concomittantly to make efficient strategies of defense
necessary.Prior to the publication of this book, the existence and significance of urban concentrations in the
preindustrial era, which after all encompasses most of urban history to date, was largely overlooked in social theory.