Janet Abu-Lughod

Abu-Lughod asked a question the world map conceals: why some cities appear at the centre of urban history and others at its margins. Her answer was a method. Study each city through its own history, place it within the networks of trade, power and migration that run through it, and only then compare it with others, without assuming that one is the model and the rest are backward versions.

Her most influential book, Before European Hegemony (1989), argues that between 1250 and 1350 a world system of eight linked trading circuits already existed, from Bruges and Genoa to Cairo, Baghdad, Samarkand, India, the Strait of Malacca and China, in which Europe was a peripheral region. Europe's later rise is explained not by any superiority of its own but by the crisis of the other centres after the Black Death. The thesis changed how the history of globalisation is taught.

Born in 1928 and dead in 2013, Abu-Lughod lived and taught in Cairo in the late 1950s, and that experience produced Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (1971), a history that treats the city as a metropolis with its own logic rather than an incomplete version of Paris. She taught at Northwestern University for two decades and then at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (1980) is her harshest study: it shows how the French colonial administration separated the medina from the European new town, and how that separation survived independence as class segregation. She later applied the same method to her own country in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles (1999) and in Race, Space, and Riots (2007), which compared the major uprisings in those three cities. Her work is a reference for the urban studies that call for theorising from the Global South.