Singapore may be the last fully working city-state on Earth
Athens, Carthage, Venice and Tyre were all countries contained within a single city. Nearly all such places were eventually swallowed by empires or nations. Today only Singapore, Monaco and Vatican City are commonly counted, and The Economist calls Singapore the world's only fully functioning example, complete with its own currency and army.
A city-state is an independent city whose sovereign territory is essentially the city itself, unlike an ordinary country with a capital, other towns and countryside. The form is ancient and appeared on several continents: Sumerian Uruk and Ur, Egyptian Thebes and Memphis, Phoenician Tyre and Sidon, the Philistine cities, Greek poleis such as Corinth, and Maya centres like Tikal and Copán. In Cyprus, the Phoenician settlement of Kition, in modern Larnaca, lasted from around 800 BC to the late fourth century BC. Rome itself began as one before growing into an empire.
Northern and central Italy made the model its standard for centuries. From roughly the eleventh to the fifteenth century, cities such as Florence, Milan, Siena and Ferrara drove trade, manufacturing and early mercantile capitalism, while Genoa and Venice became sea powers. Many were formally part of the Holy Roman Empire yet independent in practice, and most were run by a single lord or a dynasty such as the Sforza or Gonzaga families.
North of the Alps, more than 80 Free Imperial Cities inside the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed wide autonomy, reinforced by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck combined their foreign dealings through the Hanseatic League and punched well above their size diplomatically, and cities formed defensive leagues such as the Décapole in Alsace. When the empire dissolved in 1806, some became fully sovereign for a time, including Frankfurt from 1815 to 1866 and Kraków from 1815 to 1846.
The weakness was scale. Small units coexisting within a shared culture, as in Greece and Italy, often resisted merging into larger states, but they lacked the resources to fight off big neighbours; Rome's conquest of Greece is the classic case. Empires and nation-states replaced them. Some autonomous non-sovereign cities, including Hong Kong, Macau and Dubai, are still described in city-state terms.
Source: City-state
