City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global

The essays presented in this volume describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilization of manpower and resources needed to build them favored some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.

Contained communities in tropical Africa
Palisaded settlements in prehistoric Eastern North America
To wall or not to wall: evidence from Medieval Germany
Medieval walled space: urban development vs. defence
A world without walls: city and town in colonial Spanish America
The fortifications of Epaminondas and the rise of the monumental Greek city
Imperial walled cities in the West and their early medieval Nachleben
Delhi walled: changing boundaries
Walled cities in Islamic North Africa and Egypt (with particular reference to the Fatamids, 909-1171)
Ottoman military architecture in the early gunpowder era: a reassessment
Walled towns during the French wars of religion, 1560-1630
Portuguese urban fortifications in Morocco: borrowing, adaptation, and innovation along a military frontier
The artillery fortress as an engine of European overseas expansion, 1480-1750
Representations of Chinese walled cities in the pictorial and graphic arts
The hierarchy of Ming city walls
Decoration of city walls in Medieval Islam: the epigraphic message
Medieval French representations of city and other walls
Siege law, siege ritual, and the symbolism of city walls in Renaissance Europe
Representations of the city in siege views of the seventeenth century: the war of military images and their production
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City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective

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