Books by Alexander R. Thomas

City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years agothe first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.

Examines the dynamics that occur between great cities and their hinterlands in order to explain how the tiny village of Gilboa, New York, was destroyed in order to make way for the expansion of the New York City water supply.

Upstate New York is in a malaise and sociologists Alexander Thomas and Polly Smith wanted to know why. They take the reader on a tour of New York in order to diagnose the problems affecting the state and what can be done to address the issues.

The Evolution of the Ancient City is an interdisciplinary look at how cities developed from Hunter-Gatherer societies to centers of vast empires in the Fertile Crescent between 21,500 BCE and 1,200 BCE. The reader is guided through each stage of social evolution and its consequences for our understanding of modern cities. As a result, urban theory must adapt to this long-range view of the city.

Critical Rural Theory provides an exploratory foundation for anyone interested in examining the hegemonic power of urbanization and its impacts on rural people and places. This book is without parallel in the rural sociological literature for its commitment to uncovering the power of culture in addition to structure and space in maintaining urban power.