What Is a City State?

Short answer

• A city-state is an independent state whose sovereign territory is essentially one city and the land immediately around it. It has its own government, makes its own laws, conducts its own foreign relations, and controls its own borders, rather than answering to a larger national government. The city is the state, not merely its capital. The classic examples are the ancient Greek poleis, such as Athens and Sparta, and the later Italian city-states, such as Venice and Florence. Today, the three cases most commonly called city-states are Singapore, Monaco, and Vatican City. Singapore is the clearest modern example, a fully sovereign republic with its own currency, armed forces, and borders. Monaco and Vatican City are also sovereign, but their small size and special defense and legal arrangements make scholars describe them differently. Hong Kong, Macau, Dubai, and Gibraltar are sometimes called city-states in everyday speech, but they are not sovereign states, so they do not meet the strict definition used here.

What Counts as a City-State?

A city-state is not simply a famous city, a large city, or a city that feels powerful. New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris are major world cities, but none is a city-state, because each sits inside a larger sovereign country and is governed under that country’s laws. Size alone does not settle the question either. A city-state can be small, but smallness is a common feature, not the definition. Sovereignty is the test that matters most.

A useful working definition has four parts. First, a single dominant urban center, not a capital plus several other major cities. Second, a compact surrounding territory, which may include suburbs, farmland, a port, or nearby villages, but not a large multi-city region. Third, sovereignty: the government makes laws, controls entry at its borders, runs foreign policy, and is recognized as a state in its own right. Fourth, the city functions as the political, economic, and cultural center of that territory.

Historian Mogens Herman Hansen, whose comparative work on city-state cultures is widely cited, offered a broader formulation that helps explain the borderline cases: a city-state is a self-governing political unit, but not necessarily an independent one. That broader use is why a highly autonomous city inside a larger country is sometimes described as a city-state in a loose sense. This article keeps the two uses separate. When it says city-state without qualification, it means the strict, sovereign sense. When it discusses Hong Kong, Dubai, or a German state such as Hamburg, it says so explicitly.

Test	A strict city-state	Not a city-state
Sovereignty	Makes its own laws and foreign policy, and is recognized as a state	Governs locally but remains under a national constitution
Territory	One city plus its immediate surroundings	A capital plus other cities, towns, and countryside
Center of power	The city holds the government, main economy, and cultural institutions	Power is shared among several cities or levels of government
Example	Singapore	New York City, powerful but part of the United States

A nation is a group of people who share a sense of common identity, history, language, or culture. A state is a political organization with a government, a defined territory, and sovereignty. A nation-state is a state whose borders broadly match one nation. A city-state is defined mainly by its territory and government, not by whether its people form a single nation. Singapore illustrates the point: it is a city-state in territorial terms, but its population is multiethnic, so it is not a nation-state in the narrow sense of one people matching one state. The term city-state is also a modern label applied backwards to the past. Ancient Greeks used their own word, polis, not the English phrase city-state. Historians use it as an analytical category, so it should be applied by its features, not by whether an ancient source used the exact words.

The Greek Polis

When most textbooks say city-state, they are thinking first of ancient Greece. The Greek word was polis, plural poleis. World History Encyclopedia defines a polis as an urban center, often fortified and built around a sacred center on a hilltop acropolis or near a harbor, which controlled a surrounding territory called the chora. Because there was typically only one city, and because each polis was independent in its political, judicial, legal, religious, and social institutions, each polis was in effect a state. It also acted internationally, making alliances, trading, and fighting wars with other poleis and with non-Greek states.

The polis emerged from the period after the fall of Mycenaean civilization, with significant urban growth by the 8th century BCE. Over time there were more than 1,000 poleis across the Greek world, stretching far beyond modern Greece, from the Black Sea to southern Italy and Sicily, and from the eastern Mediterranean to southern France and Spain. Most were small. Sparta was exceptionally large, at about 8,500 square kilometers, according to World History Encyclopedia, but most poleis controlled far less land. Some, such as Athens, Rhodes, and Syracuse, used naval power to control wider areas across the Aegean, even though their home territory remained compact.

A polis was more than a walled town. It usually had a sacred center with temples, a fortified area, an agora for civic and commercial life, and, from the 5th century BCE onward, increasing signs of town planning in new settlements. It marked its identity with boundary markers, written law codes, its own coinage, festivals, a patron deity, and a shared civic memory expressed in statues, stories, and public monuments. The agora mattered because it was where citizens met, traded, debated, and learned news. In that sense, the polis was a community of citizens as much as a place on a map.

Citizenship, however, was narrow by modern standards. Male citizens had, at least in theory, equal political rights based on property ownership, but in practice power was dominated by a few aristocratic families, whatever the formal system. Women, children, enslaved people, freed people, laborers, and foreigners could make up as much as 90 percent of a polis population, according to World History Encyclopedia, yet they were not citizens in the political sense.

Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes

Athens is the best known polis, and the largest in cultural influence, though not the largest in land. It developed a democratic system in which male citizens could take part directly in assemblies and juries, and it became a major naval power. It was also an imperial power at times, leading the Delian League and extracting resources from allies, which shows that a city-state could behave like an empire toward other poleis. Its identity was tied to Athena, its patron deity, whose owl appeared on Athenian coins. Sparta was the exception in several ways: unusually large, famously not walled in the usual way, and organized around military discipline and control of a large subject population. Its system mixed kings, councils, and assemblies, and it is usually described as oligarchic rather than democratic. Sparta and Athens were rivals, and their long Peloponnesian War is the most famous conflict between poleis, a reminder that Greek city-states did not form a single peaceful Greek country. They formed a network of competing states that sometimes allied, sometimes fought, and sometimes united briefly against an outside enemy, as in the Persian Wars.

Corinth shows the commercial side of the polis. It sat on a narrow strip of land between two seas, controlled valuable trade routes, and produced distinctive pottery that traveled widely. Thebes, in central Greece, shows another pattern: a polis that could dominate its neighbors for a time, lead a regional league, and then lose that position to a stronger rival. Each had its own government, army, coinage, festivals, and foreign policy, which is exactly why historians count them as city-states. Poleis also cooperated through leagues and through pan-Hellenic festivals, above all the Olympic Games, which gave them a shared cultural stage without creating a shared government. The independent polis declined as larger powers grew: under Alexander and his successors, and later under Rome, poleis continued as civic communities subordinate to a larger empire.

Before Greece, and Around the World

Greece did not invent the city-state. The earliest well documented examples come from southern Mesopotamia, in present day southern Iraq, where Sumer was divided in the late 4th millennium BCE into many independent city-states separated by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to the patron god or goddess of the city, and ruled by a priestly governor, called an ensi, or by a king, called a lugal, who was closely tied to the city’s religious rites. Uruk, Ur, Nippur, Lagash, Umma, and Eridu are among the names most often cited. These cities had walls, temples, workshops, scribes, and administrations that recorded taxes, rations, and trade. Their competition was constant, sometimes leading to war over water, land, or prestige, and their identities were fiercely local, tied to a patron deity and a temple. Uruk is especially important because it is associated with some of the earliest written records.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. In the Levant, Phoenician cities such as Tyre and Sidon acted as independent trading cities, founding colonies and trading across the Mediterranean. Carthage, itself founded as a Phoenician colony in North Africa, grew into a major city-state and then into a maritime empire that rivaled Rome. Rome itself began as a city-state, centered on the Tiber, before it grew into a republic and then an empire that absorbed the very city-states that had once been its peers. In Mesoamerica, Maya civilization was organized largely as rival city-states, rather than as one centralized empire: cities such as Tikal, Copan, and Chichen Itza had their own rulers, temples, calendars, and wars. In East Africa, Swahili coastal cities such as Kilwa grew rich on Indian Ocean trade, acting as independent trading ports that linked African interior goods with Arabia, India, and beyond. In medieval and early modern Europe, the free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed considerable autonomy, and after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that autonomy gained stronger legal backing. More than 80 such cities are counted in the historical record, and some, such as Bremen, Hamburg, and Lubeck, pooled their trade relations and wielded real diplomatic weight through the Hanseatic League. The Republic of Ragusa, based in Dubrovnik, was a maritime city-state that survived for centuries by diplomacy, trade, and careful balancing between larger powers. The recurring life cycle is clear: a city-state grows strong, extends control over neighbors, and in doing so stops being a city-state and becomes something larger.

Italy: The Renaissance City-States

The Italian city-states of the Middle Ages and Renaissance are the second great example, after Greece. In northern and central Italy from the 11th to the 15th centuries, city-states with varying amounts of associated land became the standard form of polity. Some were formally part of the Holy Roman Empire while acting as independent states in practice. Their era featured remarkable economic development, trade, manufacture, and mercantile capitalism, together with increasing urbanization and influence across the Mediterranean and Europe. Most were ruled by one person, such as a signoria, or by a dynasty, such as the Gonzaga or Sforza families, though republican forms also existed and changed over time.

Venice is the clearest maritime example. Built on a lagoon, it had little farmland of its own, so it lived by trade, shipbuilding, and naval power, governing a maritime empire at its height, with ports and colonies across the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean. Genoa was its great rival, also a maritime republic, competing for the same eastern trade routes. Florence, inland, built wealth on banking, wool, and cloth, and became a center of art and humanist learning, as well as a fiercely contested republic in which powerful families, above all the Medici, shaped politics from inside and outside formal office. Milan, under the Sforza and earlier the Visconti, shows the princely city-state, a large and wealthy urban state ruled by a duke who also controlled surrounding towns and countryside. Smaller examples, such as Siena, Ferrara, Lucca, Mantua, and Urbino, show the same form at a smaller scale. San Marino, often mentioned here, survived as a republic, but modern scholars usually describe it as a microstate rather than a classic city-state, because it lacks a large urban center in the traditional sense. The Italian city-states were gradually absorbed into larger Italian states, then into a unified Italy in the 19th century, or, in Venice’s case, into the Austrian Empire and then Italy.

Why City-States Rose, and Why They Faded

City-states tended to rise where geography helped a single city: a defensible hill, an island, a lagoon, a river crossing, or a harbor on a busy trade route could give a city income and security without a large territory. Mountains and seas, as in Greece, broke land into separate pockets, each able to support its own center. Trade did much of the rest: a port city could tax goods passing through, build ships, lend money, and attract skilled workers, all without owning farms across a continent. With one government close to the merchants, artisans, and soldiers it governed, a city-state could also change tax policy, build a fleet, or sign a treaty faster than a sprawling empire.

The same features created weaknesses. A city-state had limited land, limited population, and limited food supply. It depended on trade, and trade could be cut off by war, blockade, or a shift in routes. It could be outnumbered by a larger state, and divided internally by rivalry between rich and poor, or between families competing for office. Larger states offered, or imposed, a solution: a wider tax base, a larger army, a common market, and a single law across many cities. As the nation-state model spread, with its ideas of national citizenship, centralized administration, and defined borders, the space for independent city-states shrank. Most were absorbed, and only a few, protected by geography, diplomacy, or special legal arrangements, survived as sovereign states.

The Three Modern City-States

Singapore is an island city-state in Southeast Asia, separated from Malaysia to the north and facing Indonesia to the south. It was part of the Federation of Malaysia for two years before it separated from the federation in 1965 and became an independent republic, a city, and a sovereign country. It now has about 6 million people living and working within 736.3 square kilometers, according to the city-state survey read for this article, making it one of the most densely populated countries in the world after Monaco. Singapore is the modern case that most fully matches the strict definition. It has its own currency, a large commercial airport, one of the busiest transshipment ports in the world, and fully fledged armed forces. The Economist has called it the world’s only fully functioning city-state, a judgment, not a neutral count: unlike Monaco and Vatican City, Singapore combines full sovereignty with a large population, a diversified economy, and a military able to defend itself. With little farmland and few natural resources, it depends on trade, finance, manufacturing, logistics, and services.

Monaco is a very small independent city-state on the Mediterranean coast, bordering France. Monaco-Ville, the ancient fortified city, and Monte Carlo, its well known casino and harbor district, are districts of one continuous urban zone, not separate cities, though they were three separate municipalities until 1917. The Principality of Monaco and the City of Monaco govern the same territory, each with specific powers. Monaco is sovereign, but its sovereignty is qualified in practice by defense: it maintains a small military, largely for ceremonial purposes, and would have to rely on France for defense against a serious aggressor. That does not remove its status as a sovereign state, but it explains why some writers describe Monaco as a city-state with a special relationship to France. Its economy depends heavily on tourism, finance, and services.

Vatican City is the smallest sovereign country in the world, at 0.49 square kilometers, inside Rome. Until September 1870, Rome had been controlled by the pope as part of the Papal States. When the city was seized by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, the pope refused to recognize the new kingdom, and later popes described themselves as prisoners in the Vatican. The impasse was resolved in 1929 by the Lateran Treaties between Italy and the Holy See, under which Vatican City was recognized as an independent state, with the pope as its head. It has its own citizenship, diplomatic corps, flag, and postage stamps, and a population of fewer than 1,000, mostly clergy. Vatican City is a city-state, but unlike Singapore or Monaco in purpose: it exists primarily as the seat of the Roman Catholic Church and the residence of the pope, not as a commercial port.

The Debated Cases

The hardest part of this topic is the borderline, where a city looks like a city-state, acts in some ways like one, but fails one part of the strict test. Hong Kong and Macau are the most common debated cases. Both are special administrative regions of China, and both enjoy a high degree of autonomy, with their own legal systems, currencies, and border controls in some respects. They are often called city-states in newspapers and travel writing, because each is dominated by one city and has a distinct economy and identity. In strict terms, however, they are not sovereign states. They are part of China, and their autonomy exists under Chinese law, not as independent sovereignty. A writer who calls Hong Kong a city-state without that qualification is using Hansen’s broader, self-governing sense, not the strict sovereign sense.

Dubai, and to a lesser extent Abu Dhabi, raise a similar point inside the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a major commercial and tourism center, with its own ruler and global brand, and it is often cited in popular writing as a city-state. In constitutional terms, however, Dubai is one emirate within a federation, and foreign policy and defense sit at the federal level. It is therefore best described as a highly autonomous city within a federation, or as a city-state in the loose, economic sense, not as a sovereign city-state. Gibraltar is another loose-use case: a British Overseas Territory, not a sovereign state, though it has a high degree of self-government. A second group runs in the opposite direction: sovereign states that look like city-states because one city dominates them, but that also contain other towns and rural areas. Qatar, Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Djibouti, and Malta are each centered on a single city, but they also contain other towns, with their own municipal authorities, and in some cases substantial rural or desert areas. Luxembourg, for example, contains other towns such as Esch-sur-Alzette, and a sparsely populated forested region in the north. San Marino is a similar edge case: a sovereign microstate made up of several municipalities rather than one dominant city, so most careful writers call it a microstate, not a city-state. Finally, cities that are constituent states inside a federation, such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen in Germany, are sometimes described as non-sovereign city-states. That use is precise if the federal context is stated: they are city-states within a federation, not sovereign city-states in international law. Ask three questions about any candidate: Is it sovereign? Is its territory essentially one city? Does it govern itself as a state, not merely as a municipality?

How City-States Differ From Nearby Terms

A microstate is any very small sovereign state, whatever its geography. All three modern city-states are also microstates, because they are very small, but not all microstates are city-states. San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Andorra are microstates, but they are not dominated by a single city in the way Singapore is, so they are not usually counted as city-states. A city-state also differs from a capital city. A capital is the seat of government for a larger state, but the state extends beyond it. Athens today is the capital of Greece, but modern Greece is not a city-state, because it contains many other cities, islands, and rural regions under one government. Ancient Athens was a city-state, but modern Athens is a capital. The same city can change category over time. A city-state also differs from a city within a larger state that has special powers. Berlin is a city and a German state, but Germany, not Berlin, is the sovereign state in international law. Washington, D.C. is a federal district, not a state at all, and it is governed under a special arrangement with the United States Congress.

Term	Defined by	Example
City-state	One city as a sovereign state	Singapore
Nation-state	One nation matching one state	Few states match one nation exactly, so examples are debated
Microstate	Very small sovereign state, any geography	San Marino, a microstate but not usually a city-state
Capital city	Seat of government for a larger state	Modern Athens, capital of Greece
Autonomous city	High self-government inside a larger state	Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China
Federal city-state	A city that is also a state inside a federation	Hamburg, in Germany

To check a new candidate, look first for sovereignty, then at the map: is the territory essentially one urban area, or does it contain several distinct towns and a rural hinterland? Then check the history: was it once an independent city-state that later joined a federation or empire, as Hamburg was? Finally, watch for loose language in travel writing, where city-state often means a city that feels like a world of its own, not a sovereign state.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a city-state in simple terms? A city-state is an independent country made up of one city and the land around it, with its own government, laws, and foreign policy.

What is a Greek polis? A polis, plural poleis, was an ancient Greek city-state: an urban center, often fortified, that controlled a surrounding territory and acted independently in trade, alliances, and war.

Were Athens and Sparta the only Greek city-states? No. There were more than 1,000 poleis, including Corinth, Thebes, Syracuse, Rhodes, and Argos, with governments ranging from democracy to oligarchy to tyranny.

What were the Italian city-states? Independent or largely independent urban states in northern and central Italy from the 11th to the 15th centuries, above all Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Milan.

Are there any city-states today? Yes, on the strict definition, three: Singapore, Monaco, and Vatican City. Singapore is the fullest example; Monaco and Vatican City have special defense and legal arrangements.

Is Singapore a city-state? Yes. It became an independent republic in 1965 after separating from Malaysia, and it has its own government, currency, borders, and armed forces, centered on one island city.

Is Monaco a city-state? Yes, with a qualification. Monaco is sovereign, but it maintains only a small ceremonial military and relies on France for defense against a serious aggressor.

Is Vatican City a city-state? Yes. It was recognized as an independent state in 1929 under the Lateran Treaties, with the pope as its head, and it is the smallest sovereign country in the world, at 0.49 square kilometers.

Is Hong Kong a city-state? Not in the strict sovereign sense. It is a special administrative region of China with a high degree of autonomy, but it is not an independent sovereign state.

Is Dubai a city-state? Not as a sovereign state. Dubai is one emirate within the United Arab Emirates, a federation, so foreign policy and defense sit at the federal level.

Why did most city-states disappear? Most were absorbed into larger states, empires, or nation-states that could offer a larger army, a wider tax base, and a larger market, or that conquered them.

What is the difference between a city-state and a microstate? A microstate is any very small sovereign state. A city-state is a microstate whose territory is essentially one city. San Marino is a microstate but not usually a city-state.

Sources & references

• City-state, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City-state (definition as an independent city encompassing the totality of its sovereign territory, contrasted with a regular state containing a capital plus other cities and countryside; historical list including Rome, Carthage, Athens, Sparta, Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Milan; disagreement on the number of modern city-states, with Singapore, Monaco, and Vatican City most commonly discussed; Singapore as largest and most populous, with full sovereignty, borders, currency, military, and influence, and The Economist phrase quoted there; Hong Kong, Macau, Dubai, and Gibraltar as non-sovereign or cited cases; Hansen definition of a city-state as a self-governing but not necessarily independent unit; free imperial cities, Hanseatic League, Ragusa, Novgorod, Pskov, and other historical examples; Vatican City history, 1870 seizure, 1929 Lateran Treaties, 0.49 square kilometers, citizenship, flag, and stamps; Monaco as a very small independent city-state, Monaco-Ville and Monte Carlo as districts of one urban zone and separate municipalities until 1917, small ceremonial military and reliance on France for defense; Singapore, 6 million people within 736.3 square kilometers, two years in the Federation of Malaysia before separation in 1965, currency, airport, port, and armed forces; states with similar characteristics, including Luxembourg, Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait, Bahrain, Malta, and San Marino, and why they differ from true city-states)
• Polis: The City-State of Ancient Greece, World History Encyclopedia, https://www.worldhistory.org/Polis/ (polis as an urban center, often fortified, with a sacred center on an acropolis or harbor, controlling a surrounding chora; independence in political, judicial, legal, religious, and social institutions; international affairs, trade, alliances, and wars; emergence after Mycenaean fall, urban growth by the 8th century BCE, more than 1,000 poleis, most important including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Syracuse, Aegina, Rhodes, Argos, Eretria, and Elis; Sparta at about 8,500 square kilometers as exceptionally large, most poleis small, naval power of Athens, Rhodes, and Syracuse; common features, agora, fortification from the 7th century BCE, town planning from the 5th century BCE, boundary markers, law codes, coinage, festivals, patron deities, colonies; male citizen political rights in theory, aristocratic dominance in practice, and non-citizen groups making up as much as 90 percent of population; Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues, Persian Wars, Olympic Games, decline into Macedonian and Roman subordination)
• What Is a City State? Definition and Modern Examples, ThoughtCo, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-city-state-4689289 (city-state as an independent, self-governing country contained within a single city, exercising full sovereignty; Monaco, Singapore, and Vatican City as the only three agreed cases in that article; Monaco on the French Mediterranean coast, small military and dependence on France for defense; Singapore as an island city-state, independent republic in 1965 after leaving the Malaysian Federation, representative democracy, own currency, armed forces; Vatican City, created by the 1929 Lateran Treaty, pope as head of government, economy from stamps, publications, donations, investments, and museum admissions; Hong Kong, Macau, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi as autonomous regions or non-sovereign cases in that article)