The imperial city-state and the national state form

Nation-states versus city-states

The nation-state is generally defined in opposition to city-states and empires. It is often contrasted with the city-state on the grounds that, unlike the city-state, it is a territorial state. But a city-state is also a territorial state. ¹ In fact, the territorial states that were consolidated in Europe during the 19th century bore all the features of city-states: they consisted of a dominant area surrounded by a domain of influence, produced successful economies, established central banks that functioned as lenders of last resort and as ‘instruments of power and international domination’, and employed similar means of domination and surveillance (the fleet and the army, and violence) (Braudel, 1982: 295). Moreover, like city-states, the large territorial states that emerged in the 19th century depended on imports of foodstuffs and raw materials and on long-distance trade and export production. ²

City-states had existed for millennia. They flourished all along the Silk Road, throughout Afro-Eurasia, in the Americas, and more-or-less continuously around the Mediterranean for at least 3000 years. In 1200 BCE, Phoenician city-states (Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Arados) expanded and intensified maritime trade and established a territorial division of labour in the Mediterranean littoral. The city-state form was therefore already widespread throughout the Mediterranean when the Greeks established a political system based on it.

City-states were established in southern Europe to take advantage of opportunities generated from the westward extension of Asian trade into Europe. They first emerged around the shores of the Adriatic where products arriving from along the Silk Road were then carried to the north and west. It was here, at the head of the Adriatic Sea, that Venice began, in the 9th century, to develop as a city-state; by the 11th century, it ‘had become the largest and most prosperous city in Europe after Byzantium’ (Parker, 2004: 80). Thereafter, different versions of the Venetian polis became ‘familiar features of the European scene’ (Parker, 2004: 87). In the 15th and 16th centuries, the city-states of Venice and Genoa were the leading trading powers of the Mediterranean Sea. These and the city-states of Florence, Siena, and Lucca saw themselves as the heirs of the city-states of ancient Rome and Greece (Tilly, 1994: 17).

This Italian city-state system expanded into a European system (see Lane, 1973). States emerged on the Baltic Sea and Atlantic littorals in order to profit from trade linking the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean along the Atlantic coast. These included important commercial cities in the Netherlands and Belgium, western Germany, northern France, and southern England. The Netherlands, ‘in effect a grouping of city states in the guise of a territorial (nation) state, persisted into the twentieth century’ (Parker, 2004: 182).

In the 15th century, the expansion of trade generated incentives to more securely weld cities to hinterlands and to larger, more militarily powerful territorial domains (Tilly, 1994: 26). Europeans from the maritime states along the Atlantic littoral loaded heavy cannon onto the ocean-going ships that had been developed to carry this trade in order to muscle their way into the Asian commercial world. Having succeeded in this, and in securing vast new opportunities for the pursuit of profit through overseas trade, they then sought to extend their control over larger territories so as to secure resources and labour needed for a massive expansion of production for export.

The military conquest of cities by rural-based rulers led to the consolidation of urban and rural areas into larger territorial states. However, in the process of integrating cities and urban hinterlands and, in some cases, absorbing cities into neighbouring land empires, cities remained dominant within the larger territorial units that formed around them. While the new territorial political units operated ‘chiefly as containers and deployers of coercive means, especially armed force’ (Tilly, 1994: 8), cities continued to control and channel capital flows. The de-industrialization of rural areas and concentration of industry in urban areas made cities the focus not only of industrial production but of wealth accumulation, culture, and power. Since labour was mobilized not for ‘national’ markets but for exports, cities became essentially ‘glocul’ in nature and were increasingly powerful both in absolute terms and relative to rural areas. The form of state that this produced resembled far more closely the imperial city-states of the past 5000 years than the nationally-integrated states of national cultural imaginaries and nation-state ideology. ³ The formation of large territorial units thus resulted in a re-definition of the state, rather than the emergence of an essentially different state form. ⁴ The large territorial states that were consolidated in Europe adopted the social and political institutions and practices associated with city-states: they operated, like city-states, to expand and protect external trade; and, as city-states typically do, they pursued this through overseas imperial expansion.

Nation-states, or the development of modern imperial city-states?

The notion of national territoriality emerged in the context of the increase in cross-border commercial networks, the expansion of industrial production for export, the development of new forms of exploitation and, consequently, the emergence of increasingly differentiated realms – burgeoning cities and de-industrializing hinterlands – within the territories claimed by states. However, what cultural imaginaries and nation-state ideology seemed designed to obscure was that the states that were being developed and promoted by Europeans, both in Europe and elsewhere, resembled imperial city-states far more closely than they did nationally-integrated ones.

Nation-states are thought to differ from empires because, rather than having a geographically, politically, economically and culturally identifiable core and periphery (usually consisting of a large city in control of vast peripheral hinterlands), they use productive resources to generate and distribute wealth and material well-being throughout the whole territory of the state. But, in common with imperial city-states of the past, European states in the 19th and early 20th century acquired larger territorial domains, not to develop ‘national markets’, but to increase production of goods for export.

Nation-states are said to differ from both city-states and empires because, unlike these other state forms, they are bound by a common political and cultural identity. ⁵ But, ‘very few countries are nation-states in the strict sense of the term; seldom is an independent political territory coterminous with the territory of a self-consciously united people’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997: 8). According to Walker Connor, ‘all but fourteen of today’s states contain at least one significant minority and half of the fourteen exceptions are characterized by the so-called irredentist situation in which the dominant ethnic group extends beyond the state’s borders’. Moreover, if one discards, from among these states, those characterized by the irredentist situation (Austria, the Germanies, Ireland, the Koreas, and Lesotho), the total number of people living in a state closely corresponding to the distribution of their ethnic group is less than 4 per cent – and, if we exclude the Japanese, less than 1 per cent (Connor, 1973: 1)

Movements to form ‘nation-states’ in Europe during the 19th century tended to involve territorial expansion from urban political centres or ‘cores’, and the absorption of areas with distinctly different traditions and political institutions. These movements bore all the political, economic, cultural, and military features of imperialism and colonialism ⁶ and, in many cases, the resurrection or creation of empires was their stated aim. Cities were at the centre of these processes and, in each ‘national’ domain, functioned as a seat of imperial power.

From the 16th century, London created and directed the establishment of England by establishing its provincial economies as satellites of the capital (Braudel, 1984: 365). England then expanded into Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where Celtic populations were subjugated by military conquest and forcibly united with England in different ways (the British revenue collector was as alien to the inhabitants of Great Britain as the officials of large military/bureaucratic states such as the Romanov or the Habsburg Empires). The English exercised dominance over the commerce and trade of these lands, all of which sank into the position of ‘peripheral’ countries (Hechter, 1975: 147–50). The English appropriated three-quarters of the land of Ireland for their own advantage, and it was totally subjugated to the English market (Cullen, 1968: chs. 2–4; Hechter, 1975: 84–95). In the 18th century, London controlled all of England’s production and distribution and handled at least four-fifths of its trade (Braudel, 1984: 365–6). In 1914, London was as large as the next 12 cities combined and ‘the centre of an imperium that was a city state, not unlike ancient Rome’ (Schneider, 1963: 229).

The region around Paris (the Ile de France) created France through the sometimes violent subjugation and incorporation of numerous territories: Normandy (1204) and Occitania (1271), in which there lived essentially a different people, with a different (Mediterranean) culture and a different language (langue d’oc); and, by 1500, Burgundy, Brittany (a region of Celtic culture), and Aquitaine. These areas were subordinated to the Ile de France for centuries. ⁷ Unequal exchange between Paris and the provinces ensured that Paris would continue ‘to grow more handsome and more populous…at the expense of the rest of the country’ (Braudel, 1984: 328). Spain, like France, grew by absorbing kingdoms markedly dissimilar in cultural and legal traditions and institutions, either through dynastic marriage (Castile, Aragon) or annexation by force (Navarre, Granada). In the 18th century, Lisbon was the seat of imperial administration, tenuously linked to its rural hinterland, with the monarchy maintaining ‘only symbolic ties’ with ‘Portugal’ (Hespanha, 1994: 194).

Although the term ‘imperialism’ came to be used exclusively to mean the direct or indirect domination of overseas colonial territories by modern industrial states, ⁸ the process of building states in Europe and empires abroad was essentially similar. Underlining this similarity, a number of scholars have referred to state-building processes in Europe as ‘internal colonialism’. ⁹ Like colonialism, state building in Europe involved reshaping the social and economic institutions of conquered areas to the needs of a militarily powerful ‘core’ which imposed physical control over culturally distinct groups which were discriminated against on the basis of their language, religion, or other cultural attributes. Often, they were treated as objects of exploitation, ‘as a natural resource to be plundered’, and with the brutality that states treat conquered foreign countries (Gouldner, 1977–8: 41). The economy of the peripheral area was forced into complementary development to the core, and generally rested on a single primary export. Juridical and political measures similar to those applied in overseas colonies were imposed in order to maintain the economic dependence of these areas. Members of the core monopolized commerce, trade, and credit, while in peripheral areas there was a relative lack of services and lower standard of living. The creation of Germany was achieved under the direction of Prussia and through the military conquest, enforced cultural assimilation, and economic subordination of peoples living in territories annexed from Poland, Denmark, and France. The creation of Italy was brought about by the conquest and annexation by Piedmont, a territory not even considered by most of its inhabitants to be part of Italy. ¹⁰ The south was treated as an area for quasi-colonial exploitation by the north, ¹¹ and southerners were considered by many northerners to be a biologically inferior race of barbarians. ¹² In the 19th century, the Italian peninsula still consisted of a ‘system of small territorial states each dominated by the oligarchy of a single city’ (Tilly, 1994: 18).

World cities, city-states, and the 19th-century imperial order

The expansion of industrial production in the 19th century brought urban commercial centres and export sectors across the world into closer interdependence, creating dynamic focal points of growth that developed through trans-local interaction and connection. As trading networks expanded it was cities, not states, that were incorporated into the system. The capabilities and functions that, according to Saskia Sassen and others, are associated with today’s global cities characterized the cities that formed the basis of the European-dominated imperial system of the 19th century.

Beginning in the 15th century, and using ocean-going ships that had been developed to carry goods along Europe’s Atlantic coast, fleets of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British warrior merchants sought to gain control of Asia’s trade. The Portuguese established a chain of forts and commercial outposts along the main sea route which ran between Southeast Asia and the Middle East along the Malabar coast, ¹³ and created dozens of fortified trading enclaves from Sofala (in Mozambique) to Macao in southern China. Like Lisbon itself, these were port cities oriented to trade and the exploitation of their own subject territories: transit points in the export of agricultural products from their hinterlands. From these bases, Portuguese warrior merchants established a loose network of imperial authority over the sea lanes, taxing ships in transit in return for protection. In Indian Ocean ports, they forced rulers to pay tribute and to allow them to establish settlements and acquire local lands. In East Africa, they operated within the framework of the independent city states that existed along the coast (Mombasa, Gedi, Pate, Lamu, Malindi, Zanzibar, and Kilwa).

Spanish, Dutch, and English warrior merchants who swarmed out of Europe were also primarily interested in creating and maintaining enclaves, forts, and trading posts. The administrative divisions of, New Spain’ recreated the old city states of pre-Colombian America (Darwin, 2007: 64). These large cities had sophisticated road and irrigation networks, and systems of slave labour and tribute (Colley, 2008: 44). At the time of the Spanish conquest, Mayan city states existed in the Yucatan peninsula as did the three major city states that formed the Aztec empire: Taxco, Tlatelolco, and Tenochtitlan – which at that time was larger than any city in Europe. ¹⁴ The Spanish established a network of urban centres, including Lima, Puebla, Mérida, Oaxaca, Santiago de los Cablleros de Guatemala, Cuzco, Quito, Trujillo, Cali, Bogotá, the first foundation of Buenos Aires, and Potosi – which, in 1600, was one of the largest cities in the world. In 1580, there were 225 towns in the Spanish Indies: by 1759, perhaps 13 per cent of the population of Spanish America lived in cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants (Elliot, 2006).

The imperial expansion of states along Europe’s Atlantic coast, like that of previous imperial city-states, relied primarily on what William Thompson (1999) calls ‘the Venetian model’, which relied on sea power to gain trading privileges rather than on territorial possessions. ¹⁵ Venice built a commercial empire through establishing nodes, forts, and trading posts to control other cities, many of which became city states. ¹⁶ This was the model of overseas commercial and imperial expansion that was adopted first by Lisbon, and then by Amsterdam and London, all of whom reproduced small-scale versions of what they themselves constituted: ‘small enclaves oriented to long-distant trade’ (Thompson, 1999: 156).

The Dutch and British East India Companies were ‘fashioned in the spirit of the Venetian state-galley system’ (Cox, 1959: 230). In Venice, large trading galleys (galere da mercato), constructed in the state-run shipyards of the Arsenal, were ‘a combination of state enterprise and a kind of consortium of export merchants’ (Braudel 1984: 126). The Dutch envisioned securing commercial domination of trade in Asian waters by avoiding territorial control and establishing a network of bases. But violent local succession struggles and rivalries constantly embroiled the Dutch in military conflict and shifted their strategy to one of establishing direct rule (Thompson, 1999: 165). The British East India Company established trading posts in Madras (1639), Galle (1640), Bombay (1661), and Calcutta (1690). Two clusters of city-states emerged within the ambit of the British Empire: Singapore and Hong Kong, in the Far East; Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, in the Middle East.

Cities, both in Europe and elsewhere, formed a dynamic field of transnational production and exchange. As world trade expanded, cities expanded and large new ones emerged. Singapore (founded in 1819) grew up as a hub of Southeast Asian trade and, after 1842, Shanghai became the commercial outlet of China’s Yangtze basin. Edo, by 1868, had become one of the largest cities in the world. Buenos Aires, the commercial hub of the pampas, grew from 300,000 in 1880 to 1.3 million in 1920 (Darwin, 2007: 332). Cape Town rapidly expanded to serve as a commercial centre for the diamond and gold mined inland. Melbourne and Sydney emerged on the Australian coast; and Ottoman port cities on the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, as well as the great commercial cities of Constantinople and Cairo, experienced continuous growth during the 19th century. Salonica was an important source of cotton for Europe, as was Trabzon, a centre for exports that came through the Iranian transit trade and the coastal trade along the Black Sea (Kasaba et al., 1986: 130–1). Alexandria in the 19th century was one of the world’s greatest entrepots.

All these were developed to serve global trade by providing ‘entry or exit points for the movement of goods, labour and capital’ (Tan, 2007: 853). All experienced rapid economic growth ‘and the emergence of an outward-looking, plural population linked to a dense network of maritime connections engendered by international trade’. ¹⁷ Britain promoted this ‘development’ by building banks, telegraphs, and other public services, port and city infrastructures, urban dwellings, harbour improvements, docks, rail yards and railroads, customs houses, hotels, clubs, and residences for the prosperous merchant class.

As European military power intensified and extended trading networks it was cities, not states, that were incorporated into the system. ¹⁸ The cities of Lisbon, Seville, Bahia, Havana, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Le Havre, London and New York linked together the Atlantic trade in the 16th century. Seville, Amsterdam, Acapulco, Manila, Edo [later re-named Tokyo], Guangdong and Beijing tied together circuits of silver in the 17th century. The British and Ottoman Empires were intertwined through Bombay, Karachi, Bushire, Basra, Port Said and Jidda. Port cities linking Europe and the Ottoman Empire included Corfu, Salonica, Smyrna (Izmir), Odessa, Alexandria, Beirut, Trabzon and Trieste, in the Ottoman Empire; Amsterdam, London, Venice, Genoa, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Cadiz, Seville, Rotterdam, and Le Havre, in Europe. San Francisco, Sydney, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Vancouver and Tokyo linked together the Pacific cities that had emerged by the end of the 19th century.

The interregnum and re-emergence of pre-Keynesian spatialities

As more and more countries pursued externally-oriented expansion, an escalation of European rivalries escalated and ultimately culminated in two world wars. The wartime demand for labour and the need to secure its cooperation during the second world war compelled a political ‘compromise’ with working-class movements; and the need, again, for working-class cooperation in resuming the fight against socialism after the war sustained this accommodation. ¹⁹ A ‘compromise’ was concluded that shifted investment and production towards the domestic market and, for a time, these were made to serve the expansion and integration of national markets. ²⁰

European states at the end of the Second World War were marked by sharp regional inequalities: Italy’s Mezzogiorno, Spain’s Andalusia, France’s western and southern regions, West Germany’s agricultural peripheries and border zones, Belgium’s Limburg coal-mining district, the Dutch northeastern peripheries, Denmark’s northwestern regions and islands and, more generally, the Scandinavian north; western Ireland, and much of Northern Ireland. It was only after 1945 that governments introduced policies to alleviate these regional inequalities by spreading growth ‘as evenly as possible across the entire surface of each national territory’ (Brenner, 2004: 51).

For much of the modern era and nearly everywhere, the socio-economic, political, and cultural interrelationships that bound cities across the world to each other had been denser than those that have bound together national territories. But the regional industrial and infrastructural policies that were introduced in Europe and a few other areas between the 1950s and 1970s rechannelled ‘employment and growth capacities into underdeveloped regions and rural peripheries throughout’ national territories (Brenner, 2004: 135, 137). Government policies introduced in 1945 in Britain promoted the economic regeneration of its coal-mining regions of south Wales, northern England, west Cumberland, and central Scotland; in 1966, this initiative was extended to areas ‘encompassing 40 percent of British territory and 20 percent of the total population’ (Brenner, 2004: 141). Projects introduced in the Netherlands in the 1960s sought to disperse industry, population, and employment from the western Randstad regions (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, and the Hague) to the depressed peripheral regions of the north, east, and south. French post-war regional policies were designed ‘to decentralize industrial capacities and employment out of the dominant Paris region and into major provincial cities, towns, rural areas, and border zones’ (Brenner, 2004: 141). Italy’s Southern Italy Development Agency was established in 1950 to promote agricultural modernization and industrial growth throughout the south. West Germany’s Spatial Planning Law of 1965 promoted ‘equal life conditions’ across the entire national territory – targeting, in particular, rural peripheries and eastern border areas. ²¹

The introduction of these policies led to the emergence, in a few areas of the word, of a ‘national’ form of state – one based on the development of local, rather than external, markets. However, this was to be only a brief interregnum. By the late 1970s, policies driven by the social logics that drove the global expansion of the 19th century began fuelling the expansion of cities within national territories that re-produced the political-economy of city-states. The structures that had developed over previous centuries never entirely disappeared and, after the brief interregnum of the 1950s and 1960s (characterized by Keynesian policies aimed at strengthening the ‘national’ economy and ‘national’ consumption capacity), key aspects of this system began to re-surface. In 1968, a series of uprisings and demonstrations throughout the world marked the beginning of the end of the post-Second World War order. In the US, the activities of anti-Cold War (Viet Nam) and civil rights movements upset the balance of power on which its post-Second World War Keynesian compromise had depended, and this began a shift in policies that de-regulated capital and began a broader process of dis-embedding its economy. In the 1970s, governments in other ‘first world’ countries introduced measures to eliminate restrictions on capital mobility and dismantle regulatory agencies and social welfare programs. ²² These measures were characterized as a necessity demanded by the emergence of ‘globalization’, but government policies were designed not to adjust to new circumstances but to promote a return to the export-oriented growth and capital exports that had characterized the pre-world war international political economy.

The dismantling of nationally-embedded economies brought the brief post-Second World War interregnum to an end and, with its end, pre-war structures and transnational spatialities began quickly to re-emerge. Productive resources became concentrated, once again, in cities and sub-state regions, and global trade and technology flows and capital movements were restored to their former prominence, along with the transnational flows, networks, and organizations that have always characterized it. Post-Keynesian spatial policies introduced by western European states in the 1980s actively intensified ‘uneven geographical development by strengthening globally linked city-regions’. ²³ Today, just 40 of these ‘city-regions’, according to Parag Khanna, account for two-thirds of the world economy and 90 per cent of its innovation (Khanna, 2009). These developments are characterized as ‘new’, but have only re-emerged with the adoption by governments of initiatives to re-instate, deepen, or extend pre-war structures. Khanna points out the recent restructuring initiatives are likely to generate the rebirth of the ‘mighty Hanseatic League’ (a ‘constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages’) as ‘cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate “free zones” across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, he observes, ‘and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world’. ²⁴

The dismantling of national economies has also led to the re-emergence, in ‘first world’ countries of what scholars today are calling ‘global cities’. ‘Global cities’ were characteristic of the 19th-century global imperial order, and their renewed salience under the impact of ‘globalization’ represents a re-surfacing of that system’s spatialities and institutional logics. As Peter Taylor points out, just as ‘European cities as city states led the pace’ to a modern era characterized by monopolistic, anti-market accumulation, today’s spatial networks and hierarchies capped by ‘world cities’ are the geographic counterpart of the increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of global monopolies (Taylor, 2000).

That world cities linked to post-Keynesian spatial policies in ‘first world’ countries are not newly-emerging but re-emerging can be seen by their resemblance to structures found in ‘third world’ countries which never adopted the policies that produced relatively broad-based, nationally embedded growth in the ‘first world’. Since their economic growth remained within urban-based export sectors, the centrality and overriding prominence of their cities never receded. In fact, most of today’s ‘global cities’ are located in ‘third world’ states: of the world’s 16 largest cities, each with more than 10 million inhabitants, 12 are in the third world (Mexico City, Mumbai, and São Paulo are among the world’s five largest) (Gugler, 2004: 3).

According to Manuel Castells, Europe’s global cities have ‘a structural tendency to generate a polarized occupational structure (1994: 29–30): at one pole is a cosmopolitan elite, ‘living on a daily connection to the whole world (functionally, socially, culturally)’; at the other pole is ‘the tribalism of local communities, retrenched in the spaces that they try to control as their last stand against the macro-forces that shape their lives’ (Castells, 1994: 30). This dualism is reinforced wherever downgraded jobs are filled by immigrant workers, as in western European societies, where a massive import of foreign workers had begun to form a new ‘sub-proletariat’ by the end of the 1960s. ¹ For the most part, these workers are found ‘in the least attractive and worst paid manual jobs’ (Castles, 1984: 149). Unrepresented in the government and unorganized, they have been unable to bring effective pressure on either employers or governments for higher wages, shorter hours, or better working conditions. Those from poorer lands, in particular, are often content with or resigned to poorer living conditions, creating, as David Landes observed, ‘a situation reminiscent, in small, of the industrial slums of the early nineteenth century’ (1969: 501). China’s rapid urban development in recent years has been described in similar terms: less than 0.5 per cent of Chinese households now own over 60 per cent of the nation’s personal wealth, while ‘the 150 million-odd migrant workers building China’s gleaming cities and the millions more in antiquated rural factories live in Dickensian squalor’ (Chanda, 2007: 313). Today, cities all around the world – ‘Los Angeles and Miami, Moscow and Madrid, Bogota and Kuala Lumpur’ (Castells, 1994: 19) – are fundamentally dualistic, characterized by ‘elite enclaves in which offices, hotels, luxury housing, high-scale infrastructure, and up-scale shops and restaurants have displaced low-income residents’ (Gugler, 2004: 10).

Much research and writing argues that the scale and magnitude of global economic interaction has fundamentally transformed the state, that states are no longer the major ‘containers’ of economic and social relations, and that a new form of state is emerging as a result of a ‘reterritorialization’ or ‘re-scaling’ which produces a type of state in which the national and urban converge (Brenner, 2004). But, as Neil Brenner notes, city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong already have this national-urban scaling; and, unconstrained ‘by the tensions inherent in the national-versus-urban politics of non-city states’, they are better able to mobilize strategic resources. Moreover, ‘because they are, from the start, intertwined in global networks, they enjoy a head start on other “global cities”’. ²⁵ This suggests that, rather than producing a new form of state, current trends may just as likely be returning us to a previous form. In fact, Manuel Castells surmises that the revival of the city-state ‘could be the necessary complement to the expansion of a global economy’ (1994: 30).

The city-state of Singapore is a highly industrialized city-state producing 18 per cent more manufacturing output per capita than the US (Chang, 2008: 215), and it has played a significant role in the evolution of modern Southeast Asia. ²⁶ Other sovereign city-states today include the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait; the Vatican, Monaco, Andorra, Lichtenstein, San Marino, Luxembourg, Macau, Goa, and Pondicherry. There are also autonomous cities within unitary states, including Hong Kong and Macau (in China), Ceuta and Melilla (Spanish, but located in North Africa). Cities are also component states of federations. Some have a high degree of autonomy and function as city states, e.g. Buenos Aires (formally known in English as the ‘Autonomous City of Buenos Aires’), Canberra, Vienna, Brussels, Brasilia, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Moscow, St Petersburg, Geneva, Basel-Stadt; and the emirates of Abu-Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, Fujairah, and Umm al-Qaiwain. Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa are chartered cities having the status of both a city and a state. There are also numerous federally-administered cities: Delhi, which has been given partial statehood, and Chandigarh in India; Islamabad (Islamabad Capital Territory) in Pakistan; Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya, and Labuan, an offshore international financial centre, in Malaysia; Mexico City (the Mexican Federal District, Mexico), Abuja (Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria), Washington, DC (USA), and ‘The City’ of London – the ‘financial district’ that pays no tax, has its own courts, laws, flag, and a private police force.

Conclusion

The most characteristic political form of capitalism as it developed and expanded was the city-state. The nation-state became the spatial face of capital accumulation only after the Second World War and in only those few countries where Fordist/Keynesian and social democratic policies were adopted. In those countries (in what became the ‘developed’ world), Fordist–Keynesian and social democratic policies generated and distributed wealth and material well-being nationally rather than within urban-based export sectors. These changes represented a departure from historical patterns of capitalist expansion. They were not a natural outcome of industrialization or rising GDP but the result of state regulatory policies that made investment and production serve the expansion and integration of national markets.

Current trends represent a resumption of earlier ones. Post-Keynesian spatial policies are really pre-Keynesian, and are resurrecting the interconnected urban spaces through which capitalism operated before the world wars. In those areas of the world where national states emerged as a result of the adoption of Keynesian policies this development represents a return to the spatialities that have continuously characterized other areas of the world where these policies were not adopted. Thus, current trends of change are not new but only newly salient; they have not recently emerged, but only re-emerged with the adoption by governments of a variety of restructuring initiatives designed to reinstate the spatialities and institutional logics associated with the 19th-century imperial order.