124	Perspectives in American History-
town or of useful models in works on comparable towns makes
such isolated topical studies a most feasible way to start. One must
begin somewhere.

There are of course other traditions. Sixty years ago, Werner
Sombart in Luxus und Kapitalismus2 suggested summarily and
somewhat impressionistically a unified way of looking at the phe-
nomenon of die great capital cities of die sixteenth to the eigh-
teenth centuries. Tjie combination of essentially agricultural econ-
omies, late feudal patterns of land ownership, and centralizing'~)
bureaucratic states produced the disproportionately large capital    /
cities (Paris, Madrid, Naples) of the seve^teefr*k-flnd eighteenth—
centimes which are essentially centers oi <onsumptioivnfrt ]ust for"
bureaucrats and courtiers, but for a much broader "class of rentiers
Tno&ie, clerical, and bourgeois) with dieir attendant populations of
purveyors, agents, and servants.'

"The approach of Sombart (even as developed by Weber) has
not exactly founded a school. It finds echoes in Latin American
studies in the broad integrative approach of Richard Morse3 to die
study of cities in colonial Latin America. James Scobie has shown
diat, even in the present century, comparable socio-economic cir-
cumstances can produce in Buenos Aires a city as "dominating" in
the twentieth century as Naples was in the eighteenth.4 In west
European studies, examples of diis approach are rarer. Perhaps die
modern scholarly work which most fully explores the lines sug-
gested by Sombart is Bartolome Bennassar's valuable study of Val-
ladolid, capital of Castile in the sixteendi century, a city with an
"economic de consommation bien plus que de production."5 (In-

2.Werner Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Leipzig, 1913); translated as Luxury and
Capitalism (Ann Arbor, 1967), esp. pp. 21-38. The concept of the "consumer city" was
subsequently (1921) given much wider currency by Max Weber in the papers published
in the United States as The City, ed. and transl. by Don Marrindale and Gertrud Neu-
wirth (Glencoe, 111., 1958), esp. pp. 68-70. Weber, however, draws his examples from
ancient and medieval cities, while Sombart refers specifically to the phenomenon of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

3. Richard M. Morse, "Latin American Cities: Aspects of Function and Structure,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4 (1962), 473-493.

4. James R. Scobie, Argentina: A City and a Nation, 2nd ed. (New York, 1971).

5. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid ait siede for (Paris, 1967).