Hong Kong: rise and decline of a great City (page 1 of 2)

That the world's economic geography changes from time to time is nothing new and has been a common feature of human progress and development throughout the ages.

Herodotus already observed in the 5th century BC that, 'the cities that were formerly great, have most of them become insignificant; and such as are at present powerful, were weak in olden times'.

In fact, it is remarkable how uneven economic development has been since ancient times with a great number of cities, countries and civilizations having flourished and decayed - but at different times and in different regions of the world. In early history the major clusters of wealth such as Thebes, Babylon, Persepolis Nineveh, Bactria, and Samarkand were mostly located around the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers and along the Silk Road.

However, with the rise of the seafaring Phoenician trading empire a shift in the centers of prosperity and power toward the Mediterranean Sea took place, which led at different times to the rise of cities like Athens, Tyre, Carthage, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople, and finally culminated in the 15th century with the first centers of capitalism - the Italian trading cities of Venice, Florence, Pisa and Genoa.

But, when the Portuguese Vasco de Gama discovered in 1498 a new trading route to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope and with the Spanish conquest of the Americas, trading routes shifted away from the Silk Road and the Mediterranean Sea, and threw Venice, as Montesquieu observed, into a corner of the world where it has remained.

With the rise of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires and later with the Dutch trading hegemony the clusters of wealth shifted to cities like Lisbon, Cadiz, Antwerp and Amsterdam in Europe, to Goa, Malacca, Macao and Batavia in the East, and to Mexico City, Potosi, Lima, Bahia and Havana in the Americas.

The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the British Empire in the late 18th and early 19th century brought once again huge changes in the world's economic geography as cities such as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Lancaster and Liverpool in England, and Calcutta in the East displaced the old centers of commerce, which had flourished under either Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch rule.

Then, in the late 19th century and especially in the 20th century, the rise of industrial and commercial centers in the US - first all located along the east coast but then shifting to the Great Lakes region and the west coast displaced the early English manufacturing centers.

Clearly, throughout the ages, economic growth and development has been extremely uneven whereby major changes in the world's economic geography were driven by new inventions, discoveries and social events. New inventions such as the compass, shifted trading routes from land to sea and led in the 15th century to the discovery voyages, which enlarged the world's economic sphere several-fold and relegated the until then rich Mediterranean cities into a backwater.

The construction of canals and the invention of the steam engine, steel, railroads, tractors, cars and electricity permitted the opening of landlocked territories for agriculture and industries, which led to the rapid rise of many totally new manufacturing and commercial centers, which were landlocked, in the 20th century. New industries frequently also increased the demand for commodities, which brought prosperity to cities near large resource deposits such as Manaus for rubber and to Houston and Dallas for oil.