Urban Primacy before Mark Jefferson

Abstract

The phenomenon of urban primacy has been much studied in the social sciences since Mark Jefferson introduced the term in 1939. It is less well recognized that many European and American writers of stature from the late seventeenth century onward had discussed the same phenomenon under other names, often that of a “capital” or its cognates in other languages. Their work attests to the wide currency that the concept enjoyed and offered many important suggestions regarding urban primacy's causes and consequences. Jefferson nonetheless remains a central figure in the history of the idea for having inaugurated the coordinated academic study of the topic.

• capital cities
• Mark Jefferson
• primate cities
• urban geography
• urban primacy

Defined by a standard dictionary of geographic concepts as “the largest city's preeminence in economic, social, and political affairs” or as “a city's predominance within an area” (Johnston, 2009, 580) and by a representative journal article as “the overwhelming economic, social, demographic, and political dominance of the largest city” (Sawers 1989, 841), urban primacy has long been an important focus of research in a number of social science fields. Present‐day usage of the terms “primacy” and “primate city” stems directly from a 1939 article, “The Law of the Primate City,” by Mark Jefferson (1863‐1949), professor of geography at Michigan Normal School, USA (Jefferson 1939; Martin 1968). The routine citation of this article as the source of the term suggests also that it was the origin of the concept. Were this the case, the history of thought on the subject would date back only to 1939, or as much farther back as Jefferson himself had pondered it before putting his conclusions into print. But while Jefferson did give it the name that is most commonly used today, the same phenomenon had already been discussed under other labels and sometimes still is. Under a variety of terminological disguises, it has had a longer and richer intellectual history than is usually recognized. Writers prior to Jefferson presented many themes and insights regarding both the causes and the consequences of primacy that post‐1939 scholars have readdressed independently.

Terms and Concepts

Jefferson's article of 1939 was not meant to introduce a concept. It was meant, rather, as its title attests, to invoke a familiar one (under a new name coined for the sake of clarity) in order to assert a general law: that “[a] country's leading city is always disproportionately large and exceptionally expressive of national capacity and feeling” (Jefferson 1939, 231; entire sentence italicized in the original). Jefferson made no claim to have discovered the phenomenon he called primacy. It had long been recognized under another name, he observed, one in wide currency at the time he wrote. “Outside America,” as he put it, “‘capital’ connotes the same thing as ‘primate city’” (Jefferson 1939, 227n), and he noted that his “Law of the Primate City” could equally well have been called “The Law of the Capitals.”¹ In everyday American usage, however, he added, the word “capital” was often applied merely to a seat of government, which might or might not be a dominant metropolis within its political unit. Writing as an American in an American geographical journal, he preferred to avoid ambiguity by introducing a new term and replacing “capital city” with “primate city.” That it was any more than a synonym for an already established concept he did not assert.

As early a work as Alexandre Le Maître's La Métropolitée (Le Maître 1682) made a case for the desirability of a national center whose geographic, political, economic, demographic, and cultural preeminence Thomlinson (1976, 566) recognized as “anticipating Mark Jefferson's primate city.” Le Maître used the terms “ville capitale” and “ville metropolitaine” interchangeably to denote such a center. “Capital” and its cognates in other languages have indeed often been used, as Jefferson observed, in ways equivalent to “primate city,” though also often used in the narrower sense of a country's seat of government (Topalov et al. 2010). Only an examination of particular texts and contexts can clarify what sense was in play in a given case. Even in early American usage, “capital” often meant not merely the place where the government was located, but a single city dominating all spheres of life in its political unit. Noah Webster in 1828 defined a “capital city” as “the metropolis or chief city of an empire, kingdom, state, or province” (Webster [1828] 1973: vol. 1, n.p.). A contemporary of his, the American geographer William Darby, noted repeatedly that a mere seat of government lacking other attributes of what Jefferson would call primacy could not be considered a true “capital” (Darby 1828, 535, 556, 564, 583, 592, 602, 611). By the early twentieth century, though, a comprehensive dictionary of American English defined “capital” only as “[t]he city or town which is the official seat of government in a country, state, or province, or of justice in a county” (Whitney & Smith 1911, II: 804), suggesting that Jefferson was correct in thinking another word necessary to convey his intended meaning to readers in the United States.

Even since 1939, writers either unaware of or disliking the term Jefferson introduced have continued to discuss the phenomenon of urban primacy under other names.² The economist Kenneth Boulding (1968, 1114) employed the term “capital city” to denote “the largest city in the country,” one that “dominates the life of the country, acting as a centralized focus for inputs of information and outputs of authority and, as the derivation of the word implies, as a ‘head’ to the body of the rest of the country.” In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs used the terms “genuine capital” for a country's dominant city that is also the seat of government and “de facto capital” for one lacking only the seat of government (Jacobs 1969, 143). In a later work, she considered circumstances that might lead to a country having a single “overwhelmingly important city and city‐region” (Jacobs 1984, 172)–that is to say, a primate city–but instead of speaking of urban primacy or a capital, she called such a center an “elephant city.”³ Adopting a German word, the British Marxist historian Perry Anderson (2009, 226) described a city that is the focus of its country's political, economic, and cultural life as “a true Hauptstadt”; German also offers such available synonyms as “Metropole,” “Zentrum,” and “Residenz,” as well as the more recent and Jeffersonian “Primatstellung.” Francophone social scientists have employed the terms “primatie urbaine” (e.g., Catin, Hanchane & Kamal 2008) and “primauté urbaine” (e.g., Goldblum 2010), both evidently derived from Jefferson, and “macrocéphalie urbaine” (e.g., Nyassogbo 1993) and “pays monolithiques” (e.g., Dogan 2004), both evidently not. Others have written of “monocephalous states” (Therborn 1995, 185‐86), “super cities” (Downs 1999, 20), “urban giants” (Ades and Glaeser 1995), and “urban concentration” (Wheaton and Shishido 1981), and we have also what seem to be mutant English forms of Jefferson's phrase: “prime cities” (e.g., Venables 2000), “primary cities” (e.g., Rondinelli 1985) and even “primal cities” (e.g., Inter‐American Development Bank 2000). All of these authors might have used Jefferson's term with no significant loss or gain of meaning and thereby engaged in a unified ongoing conversation.

That conversation had already been underway for a long time when Jefferson himself entered it, though conversation is perhaps not the right word for the disconnected and sporadic character of most of it. What Jefferson claimed as new–the “law” that every true country possesses a primate city–has long since been discarded. What he is still routinely given credit for, explicitly or by implication, is having noticed and formulated urban primacy, where it does occur, as a phenomenon meriting attention. Once an idea achieves prominence in the natural or social sciences, it is not uncommon for earlier formulations of it to be identified that had been largely ignored in their day. Most such claims of “anticipation” assert no more than that an important idea stated by and usually credited to one individual had earlier been stated by another individual whose contribution had, then and later, been overlooked (Merton 1967). In this case, a very different pattern appears. Earlier uses, under other names, of a concept equivalent to Jefferson's “primate city” were so numerous as to amount to mass anticipation. Put differently, the concept, as Jefferson himself indicated, was part of the common geographical literacy of his and earlier times. Some of Jefferson's forerunners in discussing urban primacy, far from being the obscure or marginal figures often resurrected in claims of anticipation, were prominent in their day and remain so in the history of social thought, public life, or literature. They will be emphasized in this article (which examines only works in English, French, and German), but they too seem to have been drawing on the concept's currency in everyday discourse.

Analyses of Primacy before Jefferson

Beyond merely recognizing urban primacy (under any label) as an identifiable phenomenon–something for which Jefferson rightly claimed no originality–writers can treat it as an effect and seek to identify its causes, or they can consider it as a cause and seek its effects. The two approaches are related, and in arguments involving circular and cumulative causation, primacy represents effect and cause at the same time. They can always be distinguished, however, and for the sake of clarity they are examined separately here.

Causes of Primacy

In his 1939 article, Jefferson ascribed the regularity stated in his “law”–”that the largest city shall be supereminent, and not merely in size, but in national influence” (Jefferson 1939, 227)–to the normal dynamics of nation‐state development. Any initial advantage that made a city the largest in its country also made it grow faster still because of the advantages of spatial concentration for most political, economic, and cultural purposes. The emergence of a single such preeminent city, Jefferson maintained, accompanied the crystallization of a country's identity; its attainment of primate status marked the point at which the country had reached full maturity. He argued that the exceptions to his law, countries apparently lacking a primate city, could be accounted for in ways that essentially confirmed his argument. They were heterogeneous states whose deep ethnic or regional divisions had obstructed the development of a national identity, or newly created ones whose sense of nationality had not yet crystallized, or dominions that still looked naturally to the imperial capital as their true metropolis, or small countries that felt the overpowering attraction of the primate cities of larger neighbors.

A full half‐century earlier, the British scholar‐statesman James Bryce (1838‐1922) had offered a very similar account. In his 1888 book The American Commonwealth, Bryce described a “capital city” as:

a city which is not only the seat of political government, but is also by the size, wealth, and character of its population the head and centre of the country, a leading seat of commerce and industry, a reservoir of financial resources, the favoured residence of the great and powerful, the spot in which the chiefs of the learned professions are to be found, where the most potent and widely‐read journals are published, whither men of literary and scientific capacity are drawn

(Bryce 1888, III: 585‐586).

Anticipating Jefferson's “law,” Bryce asserted the existence of such a dominant urban center, a metropolis concentrating national political, economic, and cultural life, to be the rule for every “great country in the world” with the single exception of the United States. Just as Jefferson did, Bryce explained away seeming exceptions, as the result, for example, of a past or present federal structure (the United States, Switzerland, Holland) or of nationality being “more recently and less perfectly consolidated” than elsewhere (Spain, Italy, and Germany) (Bryce 1888, III: 585n).

A contemporary of Bryce's, the prominent German historian and parliamentary deputy Heinrich von Treitschke (1834‐1896), likewise, though more briefly, asserted the dominance of a “capital city” (Hauptstadt) to be the normal case and a necessity without which a nation‐state could not long fully function as one (Treitschke 1899; 1900). He used the term to denote not a mere seat of government but a place concentrating “the political, intellectual, and material life” of a country (Treitschke 1899, 45). Most European countries had such a center, Treitschke observed, and he noted with satisfaction that Germany, which upon unification in 1871 had not possessed one, seemed to be acquiring one with the growing demographic and commercial preeminence of Berlin. He expressed concern, though, that, for various reasons, it might always fall short of achieving the cultural preeminence that would make it a capital in the fullest sense.

Writing in the mid‐nineteenth century, the German spatial economist J. H. von Thünen (1783‐1850) made a sophisticated theoretical case for primacy as the normal condition. In an essay first published posthumously in 1863, Thünen asked how realistic was his initial assumption that the “isolated state,” the hypothetical country of his model space‐economy, would possess a single large urban center rather than an array of smaller ones. He tallied a number of arguments both for and against the assumption and concluded that the ideal state would indeed tend to develop one metropolis much larger than any other settlement and possessing the other major traits that made up primacy as Jefferson defined it. Government officials, the learned, the well‐to‐do, and the fashionable, Thünen wrote, would be drawn to the seat of government and the opportunities and amenities that it offered, and so, to serve their needs, would “a great many people of the artisan and service class.” “The reasons for the concentration of population in the capital city,” he concluded, “are too obvious and simple to offer material for further study.” This initial advantage in size, Thünen continued, would lead most forms of commerce and industry to locate in the capital city, a tendency reinforced by the benefits of a large city for large‐scale production, accessibility to buyers, and innovation through the clustering of talent and skill. Only those few and unimportant industries “processing raw materials of little value in relation to their bulk and weight” and requiring no elaborate machinery or skilled labor would develop outside the capital (Thünen 1966, 285‐90).

In the mid‐eighteenth century, the French physiocratic economist Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau (1717‐1789) similarly thought that the primacy–political, demographic, and economic–of a capital city would arise normally if no deliberate effort were made to discourage it (Mirabeau 1756a, 1756b). “Authority naturally draws everything else towards it,” he asserted (Mirabeau, 1756a, 402). As the seat of authority, the political capital disproportionately attracted all other things–from ordinary residents to the nobility of rank, wealth, and talent to manufacturing and commerce–at the expense of provincial centers. The tendency, though, he added, differed in degree among countries, being strongest where power and administration were most concentrated in the central government. To Mirabeau, France's exceptional degree of centralization explained the extraordinary degree of dominance of Paris over the rest of the country. In similarly seeing political structure, especially the degree of political centralization, as an important determinant of primacy or its absence, some modern scholars (e.g., Mutlu 1989; Davis and Henderson 2003; Ades and Glaeser 1995; Galiani and Kim 2011; Kim and Law 2012) have reintroduced a factor that a number of pre‐Jefferson writers besides Mirabeau had emphasized.

Now known chiefly to specialists in the history of economic thought, the Philadelphia businessman‐writer Henry C. Carey (1793‐1879) was a notable figure in his day, a political economist of sufficient stature to be attacked at length by Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. Unlike Jefferson or Bryce or von Thünen, Carey saw urban primacy as neither natural nor desirable. In an extended discussion in his Principles of Social Science, published in 1858‐60, he ascribed it, where it occurred, to the attractive pull exerted by the excessive concentration of political authority. The retention of much power at the state and local levels in the American federal system, Carey suggested, had prevented the growth of an outsized national center comparable to Paris or London: “Were we to obliterate [the state governments] and place a centralized government like that of England, France, or Russia, in the city of New York, not only would it grow to the size of London, but soon would far exceed it ….” Of the fragmented Germany of his time, he observed that the absence of political centralization and of an overgrown, overbearing metropolis went naturally together (Carey 1858, 43‐44, 48).

Another American businessman turned social theorist also linked the presence or absence of a primate city to a country's form of government. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818‐1881), often identified as the founder of modern anthropology, associated a monarchical polity with centralization and with the consequent growth of the seat of government to complete dominance within the country: “In monarchies, the capital city is the state, and all without is provincial and subordinate. … These great cities are the foci into which everything tends, and the centres from which all things emanate.” A republic, on the other hand, such as the United States, had “no focus of power, wealth, respectability, and knowledge, which holds within itself the heart of the nation. … No place is provincial, none are satellites of a central metropolis” (Morgan 1852, 52).

A similar contrast between the United States and Europe impressed the Polish political writer Adam Gurowski (1805‐1866), who settled as an exile in America in 1849 and became a prominent commentator on public affairs (Fischer 1964). Gurowski used the term “capital” to denote a single city dominating the rest of its country. Such cities were “not merely administrative and governmental centres, but the great and almost exclusive foci of light,” “centres, where the whole life of the people condenses” (Gurowski 1857, 123, 361). He noted the lack of a capital city as a striking contrast between his new home and the principal states of the Old World, and he traced it to differences in their governmental structure, political centralization encouraging the development of a primate city and a federal structure like that of the United States discouraging it. Another transplanted scholar, Francis Lieber (1800‐1872), who emigrated from Europe to the United States in 1827 and became a pioneer of academic political science in his adopted land, devoted a chapter of his 1853 work On Civil Liberty and Self‐Government to the relations between the centralization of power and capital‐city dominance (Lieber 1853). Still another cosmopolitan thinker, the Russo‐French sociologist Jacques Novicow (1849‐1912) observed: “Political centralization produces the extreme preponderance of the capital city over the provinces” (Novicow 1901, 110; see also Novicow 1886). He also speculated that such dominance would be proportionately greater in ethnically homogeneous than in ethnically heterogeneous states (Novicow 1886, 114). In the same vein, Treitschke, in his earlier work, dismissed fears that the political centralization that he favored for a unified Germany would give rise to what he called “an all‐devouring capital city,” on the grounds that the country's different regions were too diverse in their character and traditions for such an overweening common center to arise (Treitschke 1865, 455).

France did have such a center, and the unchallenged dominance of Paris in their country's life prompted many French writers besides Mirabeau to reflect on the sources of urban primacy, which many found in the political sphere. In the mid‐eighteenth century, Montesquieu thought that a despotic government would cause the seat of government to grow to excessive size. By contrast, he proposed, an ordered monarchy would give rise to a more balanced urban system (Montesquieu 1899, 150‐52). Camille Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot (1791‐1873), briefly prime minister of the French Second Republic, deplored the way in which the Second Empire continued and intensified the administrative centralization of earlier times. The policy, he wrote, “immeasurably increases the attraction of the capital at the expense of the provinces,” further drawing population to the place where the opportunities for work and the enjoyments of life already most abounded (Barrot 1861, 161‐162). The prominent economist and publicist Charles Dupont‐White (1807‐1878), whose mixed feelings about the Second Empire did not prevent him from becoming an independent supporter of much of its program (Hazareesingh 2001), likewise held that: “Political centralization and a preponderant capital go together,” the concentration of power tending to concentrate a country's population, work, and thought in a single locale (Dupont‐White 1860, 5).

Effects of Primacy

If urban primacy had no significant consequences for a country, its sources and its patterns of occurrence would be of little interest. Though mainly concerned with explaining why primacy occurred–or, occasionally, failed to occur–Jefferson in his 1939 article briefly considered its effects as well. If he saw any disadvantages to a country in the possession of a primate city other than the sometimes annoying self‐absorption of that city's natives, he left them unmentioned. By drawing together migrants from all parts of the country, he wrote, “the primate city contributes much to the unification of the country” (Jefferson 1939, 229). An older contemporary of his, the American metahistorian Brooks Adams (1848‐1927), shared this favorable attitude, and on more definite grounds. Through its failure to develop the dominant capital that, by his account, both George Washington and his own grandfather, John Quincy Adams, had sought to create, he wrote, the United States had surrendered the much greater ability of a country possessing such a center to marshal its resources for effective action (Adams 1916, 1920).

In reasoning thus, Adams had many precursors. Among them, two and a half centuries earlier, was Le Maître (1682), who argued that much national capacity would be lost or wasted if the ruler and his court, the chief intellectual and cultural institutions, and the merchant community were scattered among different locales instead of being united in one. Population size, Le Maître added, promoted interchange and the political, commercial, intellectual, and moral benefits that flowed from it. Consequently, a single large city was far more valuable to a country than many moderate‐sized ones. (On the little that is known of Le Maître, see Lévy 1957.) Some decades later, Charles‐Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint Pierre (1658‐1743), best remembered as the author of a scheme for maintaining permanent peace in Europe, devoted a lengthy essay to the benefits that a country received from the growth to primacy of its capital city (Saint Pierre 1733). They included an increase in the knowledge, intelligence, and specialized skills of the population, the easier suppression of internal revolts and the easier marshalling of national resources against foreign enemies, heightened national prestige, and increased prosperity through the facilitation of commerce. He summed matters up by asserting that if one country had a number of cities of equal size, and another had “a capital city ten times larger than any other,” the second country would, as a result, considerably excel the first in intelligence, learning, wealth, and power (Saint Pierre 1733, 116). Urban primacy, Gurowski (1857) also thought, promoted a higher quality of government, by bringing together all of a nation's means of action and information. Dupont‐White (1860, 1864) held that a single dominant city offered inestimable advantages in concentrating in one spot the chief economic and political interests, the chief organs of information, and the best thinkers of the nation, as well a large share of the population itself.

Many English writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries worried about the size and influence of London, often drawing an analogy between the body politic and the body, between an excessively large capital city and an oversized head or spleen (Lauda 1975; Slack 2000). In 1683, the economist and statistician Sir William Petty (1623‐1687), much as Saint Pierre would later do, responded by posing in general terms the question of what kind of urban hierarchy his country ought to try to develop. Would it be better off, he asked, with its urban population grouped mostly in a single large center or dispersed among many smaller ones? Using twelve criteria ranging from national defense to public health to the promotion of economic life and of science and learning, he came down mostly on the side of one preeminent city in which the core elements of national life would be concentrated (Petty [1683] 1899). Several decades later, the writer Daniel Defoe (1661?‐1731) argued at length that on economic grounds it was far better that there be “one great and capital City in a Kingdom” than that “the same numbers of People dwelt in several places.” He enumerated many “Benefits of a capital City, as to Trade,” alluding as well to “other Advantages, which a conflux of People necessarily bring with it” (Defoe 1727, Pt. II, 122, 146). Thünen's analysis similarly suggested the economic superiority of a primate city over a more dispersed urban pattern.

The predominant emphasis in the post‐Jefferson literature has been on the disadvantages of primacy, and it too had its forerunners. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696‐1782) weighed the benefits and drawbacks for a country of possessing one “great city” much larger than any others. Though he dismissed several supposed disadvantages of urban primacy, Kames found some others more plausible. Currency, he thought, would accumulate in such a city, causing commerce and manufacturing in the provinces to languish. The political objections, to his mind, were even stronger. “An overgrown capital, far above a rival, has, by numbers and riches, a distressing influence in public affairs,” and by its own weight it could threaten the stability of the country's government, as both French and English history had shown. Applying his conclusions to the United Kingdom, Kames recommended a program of taxes and subsidies to reduce drastically London's size and redistribute its excess population and business around Great Britain among nine selected smaller centers, whose growth, he hoped, “would diffuse life and vigour through every corner of the realm” (Kames 1774, 60, 68).

Bryce's (1888) discussion differs from Jefferson's in being somewhat more balanced and less exclusively a celebration of primacy. Though Bryce maintained that a country gained many advantages from having a full “capital city,” he also noted some benefits that it might enjoy from the absence of one. Public opinion, he suggested, using the United States as an example, might take shape more slowly than in a country where the concentration of thought and communication in a single urban center sped the process, but by virtue of that fact it was less likely to be hasty and superficial. Nor, in a country without a capital, could one city tyrannize over the rest of the country through its power to “overawe the executive and the legislature, perhaps even to change the form of government, as Paris has done so often in France” (Bryce 188, III: 592‐593).

Largely absent from the post‐Jefferson primate‐city literature until quite recently (Wallace 2013; Schulz 2015; Fong 2016), this last point was a major concern of earlier writers. Gurowski (1857) argued that urban primacy unsettled a country's political life by making the violent seizure of power easy. To take control, from within or without, it was only necessary to conquer the city in which the country's whole life centered. Alexis de Tocqueville regarded the American republic's lack of one dominant “capital city” as an important prop to its political stability. Capital‐city preponderance, he suggested on the basis of European experience, placed the entire country at the mercy of the large urban crowd (Tocqueville [1835] 2004, 320‐21). Barrot (1861) similarly saw the dominance of a capital city as reducing political stability and promoting coups and revolutions. His political associate Élias Regnault wrote a book avowedly to answer the question: “Is the concentration of all of a country's vital forces in the capital city a source of strength or of weakness?” (Regnault 1861, vii); like Barrot, and for similar reasons, he opted for the latter answer. Dupont‐White (1860, 1864) acknowledged that the existence of such a city might expose a country to such violent changes of government. That very possibility, though, he suggested, offered a safeguard against the chief danger that a strong and centralized government itself posed, that of despotism. The power of the capital city over the state offered the needed counterweight to the state's own power, one that, as history showed, Paris had exercised on more than one occasion.

Several French writers also explored the possibility, suggested too by Kames, that a primate city is parasitic, impoverishing the rest of the nation by securing for itself an undue share of resources. Mirabeau (1756a, 1756b) argued on these grounds for a policy of decentralization to counteract the tendency. The Enlightenment political scientist the Marquis de Condorcet (1743‐1794), on the other hand, rejected the charge of parasitism in a lengthy speech to the National Assembly in 1790. The necessary concentration of power in a single spot, he argued, meant that: “[t]he capital of a very large empire will thus inevitably be a very large city; its extent, its population, and its magnificence will be proportional to the population and the wealth of the empire. To complain that a capital is large is to complain of a necessary consequence of its existence” (Condorcet [1790] 1847, 139). Challenging the idea that Paris's interests differed from those of the rest of France, Condorcet maintained that attempting to restrict a capital's growth would harm rather than benefit the country as a whole, weakening its powers and retarding the development of both the useful and the fine arts, to which the environment of a large city was essential.

Others weighing the effect of urban primacy on a country's cultural development, whether in the broad anthropological meaning of the term or in a narrower artistic sense, reached varying conclusions. In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu, as Jefferson would later do, saw a dominant capital as creating a spirit of national unity, contrasting in this regard the France and the Germany of his day: “Paris made the French” (Montesquieu 1899, 154). Bryce (1888) mentioned both pluses and minuses of a capital city for a country's cultural life. Barrot (1861) granted some of the cultural advantages for a nation in possessing a true capital city, but thought they were offset, as the example of France illustrated, by a corresponding intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of life in the provinces, a point echoed by Novicow (1894, 87‐88; 1901, 110‐111) and by the sociologist Frédéric Le Play (1864).

Two countries that have never possessed a full and indisputable primate city, Germany and the United States, have each a long tradition of reflection on the cultural benefits and disadvantages of that condition (see, e.g., Daum 2005; Elkins and McKitrick 1993, Chapter IV). Many of the leading writers of the German Enlightenment and Romantic eras, among them Wieland, Herder, Lessing, and Goethe, commented on the significance of Germany's lack of what Brunn (1989, 22) calls “an overtowering metropolis,” sometimes seeing chiefly the benefits of such a Paris‐like focus for both creativity and criticism in the arts and sometimes emphasizing the stifling, sterilizing, and homogenizing effects that one could have (Brunn 1989; Erlin 2004; Hien 2015). Such consequences of primacy, prominent in pre‐Jefferson discussions, remain largely absent from the more recent academic literature.

As historically significant figures in various domains, the writers discussed here show the wide availability in the past of the concept to which Jefferson would attach the name it most often goes by today. They were all referring to urban primacy though they did not use the term. Nor did any claim authorship of the concept, which they seem merely to have derived from the common knowledge or geographical literacy of their time. It was apparently not reinvented independently each time by each individual, nor kept alive only through their interchanges on the subject. Rather, it was drawn from the concept's continued circulation in the wider spheres of practical and popular discourse, where one can also easily find instances of its use. The concept of a capital (primate) city was frequently invoked in journalism and in political controversy: in numerous seat‐of‐government location competitions in the United States, for example, and in the debates in 1871 and 1872 over removing the French legislative chambers from Paris in the aftermath of the Commune.

Conclusion

The concept of urban primacy, though always under other names, was in common currency in Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany long prior to 1939. The usual ascription of the concept no further back than Jefferson's first use of the term in 1939 obscures its rich history. Many of these writers, indeed, are closer to the main concerns of the recent and present‐day literature regarding the causes and consequences of primacy than Jefferson: less inclined than he was, for example, to see it as a universal or a desirable condition, and more inclined to examine its political dimensions.

Their own assumptions and concerns differed enormously. Le Maître and Petty, for example, dealt with the capital city largely within the frame of seventeenth‐century European economic mercantilism and political absolutism; Tocqueville, Barrot, and Dupont‐White within those of nineteenth‐century concerns about democracy and urbanization; Jefferson himself from a view of European experience as normative; the French through a preoccupation with the role of Paris; many of the Germans and Americans through a consciousness of the absence of a similar urban center from their national lives. The substance of the idea scholars now refer to as that of the primate city nonetheless remains recognizable across many earlier expressions and uses, and Jefferson himself testified to the equivalence of “primate city” with the preexisting term “capital city.”

Urban studies more than most other fields suffers from an institutional dispersion that multiplies different names for the same thing and hinders communication and coordination among researchers. Geography has offered more of a home for thinking about cities than any other recognized social‐science discipline has. This history of thought about primacy clarifies the nature of Jefferson's own contribution and suggests a larger niche for him in the history of the concept than this discussion so far would seem to warrant. Assessing claims that earlier writers had stated the gist of Keynes’ “General Theory” in macroeconomics, Patinkin (1982) argued that the true author of an idea is the one who first made it the “central message” of a text–not merely sketched it in a discussion focused on other matters–and who explained its implications and its importance effectively enough to make them clear. Jefferson more than almost any of the writers discussed here made urban primacy such a focus.

By writing in an academic journal, he also introduced the concept into an active network of transmission and discussion, calling attention to it as a significant phenomenon in a way that made it easy for other researchers to take note and pursue the matter further. The discussion of primacy after his article became much more coherent than it had been before. It took on, indeed, dimensions of the topic that Jefferson himself had not considered. His successors have been much less inclined to celebrate primacy or to treat it as a normal end state (though with some notable exceptions: e.g., Rose 1966; Mera 1973), seeking to explain why it occurs where it does and not elsewhere (for a recent example, see Wan, Yang & Zhang 2017). They have been much more attentive to political roots of urban primacy and to its political implications. And they have explored a side of it that has become far more evident since 1939, the frequent occurrence of primate cities in newly independent ex‐European colonies. But much of this attention itself was greatly facilitated by Jefferson's own article. In that sense, 1939 marks the boundary between the history of the concept and what might be called its prehistories. Before 1939, it was again and again restated and put to use, but it had not yet been isolated and fixed as a matter of separate interest. The association of Jefferson's name with the concept is thus not inappropriate, but neither should it obscure the idea's earlier histories.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William B. Meyer

DR. MEYER is an associate professor of geography at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York 13346 [[email protected]].

Notes

1. Thus Jefferson did not define a primate city as one with twice or more the population of the next largest city. Rather, he introduced that numerical index–one taken up by many later writers–as a plausible, though imperfect, indicator of the presence of primacy as he defined the phenomenon. “For most urban specialists the disparity in population sizes [between the primate and lesser cities] is but an indicator of more significant relationships” (Argenbright 2013, 20).

2. Cybriwsky (1998, 234n) found fault with Jefferson's choice of a name: “Use of the term primate city ignores the fact that in correct English the adjective ‘primate’ refers to a zoological category. It is never a synonym for ‘first‐ranking’ or ‘primary.’” But as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, the word's original meanings referred to social rank, the natural‐science sense being derived from them by analogy, not the other way around.

3. Clark (1988, 42) noted “Jacobs's apparent lack of familiarity with the primate city literature (why else did she coin the concept of the elephant city?).”