In November 2020, The American Doubleday publishing company published the book Metropolis: a history of the city, human beings great investment by the British historian Ben Wilson ）。 Wilson received his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Cambridge University. He has published several books, including "what is the price of freedom?" Winning the Sommerfeld Maugham award, ocean Empire: the rise and fall of the British navy was on the best seller list of the Sunday Times.

This book outlines how the rise of cities has shaped human history over the past 6000 years. Wilson noted that before 1800, no more than 5% of the world's total population lived in "urban areas with acceptable area". Now demographers predict that two-thirds of the population will live in cities by 2050.

In the 200000 year history of mankind, cities have the deepest impact on mankind. Cities have created all kinds of great human undertakings - new occupations, new forms of art, religion and trade, and gave birth to human civilization.

Wilson combed all kinds of innovations promoted by the huge energy of the crowd: citizen interaction in the ancient market of Athens, Global trade in Baghdad in the 19th century, financial business negotiated in London cafes, comfortable home life in downtown Amsterdam, peacocking of some people in the beautiful age of Paris (1871-1914), etc.

Nowadays, cities are still important or even more important. The skyscrapers in New York have inspired people's utopian imagination of community design, and the trees in Seattle and Shanghai in the 21st century point to the future of sustainable development. This book focuses on 26 important cities from the past to the present. In short, the history of human civilization is basically the history of cities.

In order to investigate "the people who settled in the city and what ways they found to cope with the pressure cooker like urban life and survive", Wilson analyzed several metropolises at a critical juncture in their respective history.

For example, Baghdad in the middle ages gathered cooking traditions in all directions, and developed cooking is still the "trademark" of big cities; In the early 20th century, New York desperately built "bigger, better and more profitable" skyscrapers, which shows how powerful commercial power has played in the city center; An investigation of Los Angeles after World War II shows that, The great white migration (referring to how whites moved to the suburbs because they were worried about the security of the city center), the rise of the suburbs, globalization and other factors jointly caused the phenomenon of "super city"; the book also describes the so-called "Paris disease", which refers to how 19th-century tourists with romantic imagination of the French capital were shocked by the dirty, crowded and rude they encountered in Paris.

Wilson was adept at discussing different topics. For example, he described the epic of Gilgamesh and its relationship with Uruk, the first big city in the world; It tells about the coffee culture in London in the 18th century and the undercurrent of political dissent and rebellion against social norms; Talked about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the rapid and difficult recovery of the two cities, and so on. Although Wilson is British, the content of this book shows that he is also quite familiar with the early history of hip-hop culture born in the United States.

This book tells world history from the perspective of cities. But from another point of view, this book is also a kind travel guide, full of charming mystery and clear analysis. The "wandering traveler" who stays at home should appreciate this book very much.

Some book critics said that this book can be compared with several other important works on cities, Including James C. Scott, a professor of political science at Yale University in the United States, who wrote against grain: a deep history of the earliest countries (Yale University press, 2017), which examines the close relationship between early agriculture, the initial city and the initial government; the Cities:The First 6000 Years of Monica Smith, an anthropology professor at University of California at Los Angeles, China (the Chinese version of the Chinese facial publishing house in Taiwan in September 2021) is named "city, evolution, and human". ）； There is also the immortal masterpiece death and life of American big cities (Memorial Edition), published by the famous Canadian scholar Jane Jacobs in 1961 (Yilin publishing house, August 2006).