Wheatley, Paul

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WHEATLEY, PAUL

WHEATLEY, PAUL (1921–1999) was a professor at the University of Chicago who specialized in comparative urbanism and historical urban geography. If ever there was a contemporary scholar outside the field of religious studies itself who made a persuasive and elegant case for relating the study of religion to comparative worldviews and complex social processes, it was Paul Wheatley. His magisterial book The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City still stands as a model for comparative studies of the social and religious dimensions of traditional urban settlements. The excellence of this book can be attributed in part to Wheatley's extraordinary linguistic abilities, his insightful handling of primary texts, and his elegant application and testing of his theories on the nature of the city, social stratification, and the religious imagination. Wheatley came to this achievement through his intensive study of historical geography. He was the first British geographer to explore sources in Chinese and Arabic, which he combined with Latin and Greek texts in his early book The Golden Khersonese: An Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula Before ad 1500.

Early Career

Paul Wheatley was born in 1921 in Gloucestershire, England. He spent part of his youth in the village of Enham (later also named Alamein), a community set aside for families of seriously injured veterans of World War I. During Wheatley's youthful excursions around Coatswell and Salisbury, he developed interests in two landscapes: the geography of that part of England and the celestial landscapes that he observed during nighttime travels. In his early schooling he excelled in Latin and Greek; by 1939 to 1940 he had completed his first college degree in classics (Latin and Greek, philosophy and religion) in a two-year accelerated program offered by Kings College, London. Wheatley also studied two subjects that became foundational for his later study of urbanism, namely geology and geomorphology (the study of the origin and development of the earth's surface features). In 1940 Wheatley volunteered for service in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He served as a navigator, a parachute instructor in North Africa and Italy, and a trainer for British paratroopers preparing for the invasion of France in June 1944. He saw intense combat as a member of Squadron 150 of the RAF's Bomber Command and Pathfinder Group 205, surviving a crash landing in Iraq as well as forced parachute jumps behind the German lines in Italy and later in Yugoslavia.

Postwar Work

After Wheatley returned from his war service, he met Henry Clifford Darby (1909–1992), a distinguished professor of geography, and became involved in Darby's historical geography project, which made use of the 1068 Domesday Book of William I, King of England from 1066 to 1087. Wheatley's interest in local geography and place names coupled with his knowledge of Latin allowed him to assist in the reading of the medieval manuscripts that Darby was analyzing. Wheatley eventually contributed the Staffordshire chapter and coauthored the Somerset chapter in Darby's book The Domesday Geography of England, which was published in 1954. In 1949 Wheatley received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize and was awarded his bachelor's degree with first class honors in geography from the University of Liverpool. He then joined the faculty of University College, London, where Darby had relocated. In 1952 Wheatley left England for the University of Malaya in Singapore (now the National University of Singapore), where he first served as the "neophyte colonial lecturer" and later as lecturer in geography.

During the next seven years Wheatley traveled extensively in the Malay Peninsula, did field archaeology, expanded his linguistic abilities, taught courses at the university, and founded the Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography. He also made use of classical Greek, classical Malay, Arabic, and Chinese sources to prepare two works that served both as source books and as innovative interpretations of the historical geography of the region. These were The Golden Khersonese and Impressions of the Malay Peninsula in Ancient Times (Singapore, 1964). In 1957 Wheatley married Margaret E. Ashworth, a member of the geography faculty at the University of Malaya. They moved to the United States in 1958, where Wheatley served on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley until 1966. While helping to raise his two sons, Julian and Jonathan, Wheatley became deeply interested in the problem of urban origins. He discovered an intricate set of relationships between the rise of permanent social stratification and the organizing capabilities of religious thought as manifested in monumental ceremonial centers. He began an intensive analysis of the origins of cities as indicated in Chinese sources and expanded his focus to deciphering the process of primary urban generation in Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Nigeria, Peru, and Egypt.

Mature Work

Wheatley's most influential monograph was The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago, 1971). In this study Wheatley sought to understand the complex forces that led to the genesis of the first cities, especially the factors associated with permanent social differentiation. In each instance of urban origins, he found that "the earliest foci of power and authority took the form of ceremonial centers, with religious symbolism imprinted deeply on their physiognomy and their operation in the hands of organized priesthoods." Priestly elites in all seven areas of primary generation (northern China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, southwestern Nigeria, central Mexico, and Peru) had developed "greatly amplified ethical systems" which were part of a "new instrument for the organization of sacred, economic, social and political space" (p. 305). Wheatley stated concisely that these ceremonial centers "functioned as instruments for the dissemination through all levels of society of beliefs which, in turn, enabled the wielders of political power to justify their goals in terms of the basic values of that society, and to present the realization of class-directed aims as the implementation of collectively desirable policies" (p. 305).

Wheatley found the key to the efficacy of these ceremonial centers in a religious mode of thought that he called "cosmo-magical symbolism." This mode of thought "presupposes an intimate parallelism between the mathematically expressible regimes of the heavens, and the biologically determined rhythms of life on earth (as manifested conjointly in the succession of the seasons and the annual cycles of plant regeneration)" (p. 414). In Wheatley's understanding, there were at least three patterns of urban order that emerged from cosmo-magical thought: the pattern of building monumental capitals around supremely important ritual structures; the use of cardinal axiality (designing the city with fixed reference lines to the four principal points of the compass) to organize large urban populations, transportation systems and even general systems of market exchange; and the imprinting of episodes from the culture's mythology in the layout and ornamentation of major buildings. Wheatley illustrated these complex interrelations with the use of maps and narratives, showing the ways in which the morphology of specific ceremonial cities influenced the formation of economic and social order as well as reflecting cosmo-magical thought.

Wheatley's position was and remains a major challenge to materialist interpretations of the causes and nature of urban organization and authority. While several of his major books resulted from intensive analysis of the geographic and economic, especially exchange patterns of and within urban centers, Wheatley insisted that the evidence showed repeatedly that rulers just as often subordinated their technology and economic practices to religious symbolism as the other way around.

From 1966 to 1971 Wheatley served on the faculty at University College, London, where he produced several definitive essays in urban studies, including "City as Symbol" (1969) and "The Concept of Urbanism" (1972). He also contributed a prefatory essay to An Historical Atlas of China (1966). From 1971 until his retirement in 1991, he served as professor of geography and social thought at the University of Chicago. During Wheatley's years on the Chicago faculty, he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought and its chairman from 1977 to 1991. The novelist Saul Bellow was one of the distinguished members of this committee and included a flattering literary portrait of Paul Wheatley in his novel Ravelstein (2000). Wheatley was remarkably productive during his Chicago years, publishing on various questions of urban origins and history in From Court to Capital: A Tentative Interpretation of the Origins of the Japanese Urban Tradition (1978), Nagara and Commandery: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions (1983), and the monumental two-volume Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital, c. 1400–1980 (1983), which he edited with Kernial Singh Sandhu. His editorial collaboration with Sandhu continued in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (1989). Wheatley's final book, published posthumously, was The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh to Tenth Centuries (2001). During these years he also served on numerous external committees, including the Jerusalem Committee, a group that advised Mayor Teddy Kollek (b. 1911) on the future organization of the city; the Ford Foundation, on academic fellowships for Vietnamese refugees; and the regional advisory board of the Southeast Asian Journal of Ethnicity. In addition, Wheatley served on the editorial boards of Urbanism and Social Change, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Oriental Studies, and other scholarly periodicals.

Wheatley was highly skilled in the use of human language, and wrote elegantly and movingly in his essays and books about the topics that engaged him. After his death in 1999, a eulogy about him stated, "Wheatley was a man of ideas, of exacting standards and often of forceful expression.… Only the grand thesis was good enough for him. A belief in the value of a comparative world view and an inter-disciplinary approach inspired his lifelong exploration of urbanism and his conviction that the emergence of the city was a turning point in the history of human society."