Testing the Model of the Pre-Industrial City: The Case of Ante-Bellum Charleston, South Carolina

Abstract

It has become clear that Sjoberg's much criticized but highly influential model of the pre-industrial city is not relevant to all non-industrial cities. Its applicability within the western world is likely to be limited to a minority of cities which were not only dependent upon low levels of technology, but were also dominated by non-mercantile elites. Some areas of the Southern U.S.A. before the Civil War appear to have possessed many characteristics of the rather special social structure which Sjoberg wrongly argued were characteristic of all pre-industrial societies. In particular, Charleston in South Carolina was dominated for several decades of the nineteenth century by an oligarchy of slave-owning planter families. A review of Charleston historiography reveals close parallels with Sjoberg's description of the characteristics of pre-industrial society. Some aspects of the internal structure of the city deviated from the 'ecology' of the model, further qualifying the claims of its author. However, other spatial aspects, both patterns and processes, showed a marked conformity with the model, demonstrating the usefulness of Sjoberg's ideas in interpreting one major dimension of Charleston's internal structure. The contribution made by the model towards the understanding of the internal dynamics of ante-bellum Charleston is sufficient to justify further testing in similar situations elsewhere. DURING almost two decades since the publication of The pre-industrial city, Sjoberg's attempt to develop a 'constructed type' of cities in non-industrial societies has attracted repeated criticism. I Reviewers have, in particular, objected to the misleading simplicity of the pre-industrialindustrial dichotomy upon which the argument largely rests and to the enormous spatial and temporal claims for the validity of the model.2 In spite of this generally critical veiw, Sjoberg's ideas continue to be invoked whenever social scientists search for generalizations on the nature of cities in non-industrial societies. Indeed, as Janet Abu-Lughod observed in a recent essay, The pre-industrial city is 'perhaps the most influential book to have come out in comparative urbanism during the present generation'3. Students of the internal structure of cities in the western world have not escaped Sjoberg's influence. Again, much of the commentary has been critical, but there has nevertheless grown up a widespread assumption that a type of 'pre-industrial city' existed in Europe and North America before the onset of urban industrialization. The concept has, however, usually been used loosely, and attempts to test the model systematically have been few. As Warnes has written, 'firm evidence of Sjoberg's generalization holding for western cities before they were industrialized has not been produced'4. It is also true, however, that hard evidence suggesting that the model is irrelevant to western societies is only a little more plentiful. Testing by some historical geographers of a few of the basic ideas in certain cities in England and North America has contributed to the latter view. Warnes examined patterns of occupational status in Chorley in 1851, and showed that the status gradient postulated by Sjoberg was not present. He concluded that, 'hypotheses about pre-industrial cities cannot be simply transferred to early nineteenth-century cities in western society'5. John Langton, in a study of seventeenth-century Newcastle, concluded that the city's social geography was not merely more complicated than the Sjoberg model, but 'fundamentally different' from it.6 Davey and Doucet found that the social