City-State

A city-state is an independent city that encompasses the totality of its own sovereign territory, distinguishing it from a conventional state, which typically combines a capital city with additional urban centers and surrounding countryside under a single government. City-states are self-governing political units in which the boundaries of the urban settlement and the state itself coincide, lacking the peripheral cities or substantial rural territory under separate municipal governance found in larger nations. City-states have arisen across diverse regions and periods of history, including the Sumerian cities of Uruk, Ur, and Nippur, ancient Egyptian centers such as Thebes and Memphis, Phoenician settlements including Tyre and Sidon, and the Greek poleis, among them Athens and Sparta, in the ancient world; the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Genoa, which flourished from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and developed notable economic development, trade, manufacturing, and mercantile capitalism, in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and Central Asian cities along the Silk Road, Swahili coast settlements, Russian city-states such as Novgorod, and the free imperial cities of German-speaking Europe in other historical contexts. Today only three sovereign city-states remain: Vatican City, the smallest, Monaco, and Singapore, with Singapore widely described as the world's only fully functioning city-state, possessing its own independent currency, military forces, and international diplomatic presence.