CDS (I) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 31 of 120

Correct — A, London. London reached a million at the very start of the nineteenth century — the census of 1801 already returned 1,011,157 people for the metropolis, and 1,197,673 in 1811. Settlement geography dates the crossing to about 1810, and the NCERT chapter this item is drawn from says so in as many words: the first urban settlement to reach a population of one million was the city of London, by around A.D. 1810. Nothing else on the list is close. Paris first shows above a million in the census of 1851, New York in 1880, and Washington D.C. has never managed it at all. Put another way, when London was already a million-city, Paris held about half a million people and New York was a town of sixty thousand.

• (b)Paris — Second, not first. Paris counted 546,856 in 1801 and 935,261 in 1841, and first appears above a million in the census of 1851 with 1,053,262 — about half a century behind London.
• (c)New York — New York had 60,515 people in 1800 and was still short of the mark at 942,292 in 1870. It crossed a million in the census of 1880, by which time London had held that status for roughly eighty years.
• (d)Washington D.C. — The one option that has never been a million city at all. The District's population peaked at 802,178 in the 1950 census and stood at 689,545 in 2020. Only its weekday daytime population, swollen by commuters from Maryland and Virginia, goes past a million.

A million city, or million-plus city, is simply an urban settlement whose population has passed one million. The label matters in geography because it marks the point at which industrial-era urbanisation stopped producing large towns and started producing cities of a wholly new order. In 1800 only about 3 per cent of the world's people lived in urban areas; by 1950 it was 30 per cent and by 2001 about 48 per cent. Only around 175 cities had crossed the million mark by 1982; today the count runs into many hundreds.

The route to the answer is chronological, not demographic. Ask which of these four cities industrialised first and grew fastest earliest, and London answers itself — it was the capital of the first industrial economy and the largest city on earth for most of the nineteenth century. The trap is New York, which feels like the archetypal big city because it dominated the twentieth; but its million came eighty years after London's. Washington D.C. is the give-away distractor: a planned federal capital deliberately kept administrative rather than industrial, it has never been a million city. One honest caveat on the stem itself — historians do argue that ancient Rome, and possibly Beijing in the eighteenth century, reached a million before any European city of the modern era. The question sidesteps that debate by offering only four modern Western cities, and among those four the answer is not in doubt.

• London's census population was 1,011,157 in 1801, 1,197,673 in 1811 and 1,450,122 in 1821; the crossing of the million mark is conventionally dated to about 1810.
• Paris first records more than a million in the census of 1851 (1,053,262), having been 546,856 in 1801.
• New York City first records more than a million in the census of 1880 (1,206,299); it was 942,292 in 1870.
• Washington D.C. has never reached a million: 802,178 at its 1950 peak and 689,545 at the 2020 census.
• About 175 cities worldwide had crossed the one-million mark by 1982, against a world urban share that rose from 3 per cent in 1800 to 48 per cent in 2001.

• Assuming New York, because it dominated the twentieth century, must have been the earliest million city.
• Confusing the million-city threshold with the megacity threshold, which is ten million.
• Reading a capital city as automatically large — Washington D.C. was designed as an administrative seat and never industrialised.

Either as a straight 'which was the first million city' item, or as a list-based question asking which named Indian cities are million-plus as of a stated Census.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Approximately what share of the world's population lived in urban areas in the year 1800?

  • (a)3 per cent
  • (b)14 per cent
  • (c)30 per cent
  • (d)48 per cent

  Answer(a) 3 per cent — the world urban share rose to about 14 per cent by 1900, 30 per cent by 1950 and 48 per cent by 2001.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  An urban settlement is designated a megacity once its population crosses which one of the following thresholds?

  • (a)One million
  • (b)Five million
  • (c)Ten million
  • (d)Twenty million

  Answer(c) Ten million — a million-plus city crosses one million, while the megacity threshold in common use is ten million.