The paperback publication of Peter Clark's monumental Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History provides an opportunity to revisit this essential text and its contribution to our understanding of urban history in the longue durée. The volume includes contributions from more than 50 authors in 44 chapters touching on five continents across 6,000 years. Authors are drawn from history, classics, archaeology, geography, urban studies and a range of other social science disciplines working in Europe, North America, Africa and Australia. In both its scale and scope, it allows us to assess continuity and change in the urban form and observe its differences across nations and continents, escaping the western focus that has dominated the literature to date.

Obviously, a work of this ambition requires careful organization. Order and coherence are delivered by the division of the volume into three main chronological parts – early, pre-modern and modern and contemporary cities – with each part sub-divided into geographical chapters and themes. The geographical focus shifts across time with northern Europe and the Americas missing from the earliest period, sub-Saharan Africa largely absent from the early modern section while East Asia occupies a significant proportion of each part. The prominence of Japan and China is complemented by a number of chapters exploring the Mesopotamian, ‘middle eastern’ and Ottoman city that together demonstrate the huge importance of these areas in comparison to the relative novelty of the urban experience of northern Europe and the US. In particular, they encourage us to think differently about what a city looked like, what it was for and the scale and speed of development, with ceremonial and military cities, often of massive proportions, dominating until the twentieth century when rapid industrialization prompted immense growth. Thus, as Kristin Stapleton notes, the Special Economic Zone of Shenzen in China's Guangdong Province grew from just 30,000 people in 1980 to a population of nine million 30 years later – dwarfing the expansion of nineteenth-century European cities like Middlesbrough or Bochum. This shifting, and surprising, distribution of urban scale is very effectively illustrated in a set of 20 maps that chart the world's urban transformation across five millennia, demonstrating Europe's relatively short-lived dominance of the urban hierarchy.

If the collection redresses the balance in terms of geographical spread and, to a lesser extent, temporal focus, the thematic treatment is more traditional. At the centre is the urban economy. This dominates not just the chapters devoted to it but many of the others as well – those on port cities, population and poverty as well as most of the regional studies. Population and migration is similarly a central concern. It is apparent that at almost all times the size and shape of cities is determined by the movement of peoples generated mostly by the economy but also by war, political demands, religious conquest and colonial expansion and retreat. On the other hand, while these latter mentioned considerations of power are central to the earlier periods, they do not feature so directly in the modern era, reflecting the more complex nature of governance and leadership in an age of mass urbanization. Indeed, one key feature of the collection is the tension between the city as a seat of power – regal, military, colonial, religious – and the city as an economic hub, with the balance shifting across time and space. Thus, the massive ceremonial cities of ancient Mesopotamia, Central America, China and Japan with their strict hierarchies and spatial configurations can be contrasted to the fluid, dynamic trading centres of the Mediterranean, south-east Asia or Europe's Atlantic coast. In a similar vein, the military-colonial settlements produced by invading armies in India and China in the two millennia before the Common Era, by the Muslim and Ottoman advances from the seventh century and by the colonial cities of North and South America, Southern Africa and British India offer a counterpoint to places created and driven by industrial developments or as centres for internal trade and consumption.

Two other themes do feature strongly in the volume, the urban environment – a staple of the discipline and one that has been contested almost since the appearance of the first cities – and culture, less easily defined and delineated. Contests for water, the problem of waste, the impact of building and attempts to control it are all at the heart of the book and given particular prominence in thematic chapters. It is here that disease and health make their fleeting appearance and where power is more covertly discussed. Culture is given discrete consideration, for example in a chapter on the modern creative city, in a somewhat misplaced chapter on film – a topic which does not seem to merit such prominence in a book of this scale – and in discussions of early religion and early modern urban cultural representations. These make some attempt to see the city as a social space for ordinary people though it is in discussions of the growth of personal consumption and the city's mediating role between town and country that culture appears in more material ways. Urban people are certainly not a prominent feature of this collection and social and cultural history plays a secondary role to economics and politics. Maybe, having established why cities are where they are, how and why, a second volume is required to show how people lived in, shaped and used the urban environment over the 6,000 years of city life.

Unlike the reviewer, very few people will read this book from cover to cover. That is a shame, for while it can and will provide an excellent resource for teaching and researching various elements of urban history, read as a piece it can also make a huge contribution to our wider understanding of how cities function. Many of the themes in Augusta McMahon's excellent opening chapter on Mesopotamia recur again and again across the world wherever cities are built. Thus, while the individual chapters in this volume are uniformly of a very high standard it is in giving urban history that long-term perspective that the work makes its greatest contribution to our field and for all those with an interest in the urban form.