Capital city

• 1. Introduction

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  Damascus has existed since around 2500 BC, the earliest capital still standing. That single fact hints at how old the idea of a capital city really is. A capital is the municipality holding primary status in a country, state, province, department, or other subnational division, usually as its seat of government. Yet the simple word hides a tangle of exceptions. Some countries have several capitals at once. A few have none. One territory's official capital is a ghost town. How did a Latin word for "head" come to carry so much weight? Why do governments sometimes build a brand new city from nothing, or move their seat of power across the map? And why have armies poured resources into defending a single town when the government could have fled elsewhere? The answers run from ancient Babylon to a divided street in Cyprus.

• 2. Head Of The World

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  The word capital descends from the Latin caput, genitive capitis, meaning 'head', later borrowed from the Medieval Latin capitalis, 'of the head'. That root carried real ambition. The poet Ovid used the phrase Roma Caput Mundi already in the 1st century BC, casting Rome as the head of a known world made up of Europe, North Africa, and Southwest Asia. Rome's claim rested on its long run of power, first as the capital of the Republic and the Empire, then as the centre of the Catholic Church. English-language media still lean on this head-for-body habit, using a capital's name to stand in for the government there. "London-Washington relations" is understood to mean diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and the United States. Lower administrative divisions get their own vocabulary too. Several English-speaking states use county town and county seat, while some unitary states call subnational capitals 'administrative centres'. The capital is often the largest city of its constituent, though Damascus is far from the only reminder that the rule bends easily.

• 3. Why Cities Become Capitals

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  Babylon, Athens, Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, Constantinople, Chang'an, and ancient Cusco all followed a similar path: the major economic centre of a state or region became the focal point of political power, then a capital through conquest or federation. The pull endured because capitals draw people. They attract the politically motivated, along with the lawyers, political scientists, bankers, journalists, and public policy makers whose skills keep national or imperial governments running. Religion thickened the gravity further. Constantinople and Jerusalem each held more than one faith, Rome and Vatican City anchored the Roman Catholic Church, Moscow the Russian Orthodox Church, and Belgrade the Serbian Orthodox Church, with Babylon, Paris, and Beijing also serving as religious centres. The convergence of power is not guaranteed. Traditional capitals can be eclipsed by rivals, as Nanjing was by Shanghai and Quebec City by Montreal, and the modern capital has not always existed at all. Medieval Western Europe often ran an itinerant, wandering government, while "political nomadism" in the ancient Near East moved the ruler around to tighten ties with subjects. When a dynasty or culture collapsed, its capital could simply vanish, as happened at Babylon and Cahokia.

• 4. Capitals Without A Law

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  Bern, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London, Paris, and Wellington share an odd trait: none of them was made a capital by constitution or legislation. They are recognized as capitals by convention, because all or almost all of a country's central political institutions sit in or near them, from government departments and the supreme court to the legislature and embassies. Geopolitics has rewritten the map elsewhere. Finland's first city, Turku, had been the country's most important city since the Middle Ages and became capital in 1809. During the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812, it lost that position when the Russian Empire made Helsinki the capital. Federations and unitary states layer capitals on top of one another. Canada has a federal capital plus capitals for its ten provinces and three territories, while Australia's six state capitals are Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney. Germany gives each Land its own capital, such as Dresden, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and Munich, even as Berlin doubles as a constituent state in its own right. The pattern multiplies as nation-states do, and the count of new capitals has risen sharply since the Renaissance, especially with independent nation-states founded since the eighteenth century.

• 5. Building A Capital From Scratch

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  Canberra exists because Melbourne and Sydney could not agree, so Australia chose a compromise location between them. That logic, a town picked because no rival would concede the privilege, explains a long list of planned capitals usually placed roughly equidistant between competing centres. Washington, D.C. came from the Compromise of 1790, balancing more urbanized Northern states against agrarian Southern slave states; the resulting Residence Act approved a national capital on the Potomac River, on land ceded from Maryland and Virginia. Frankfort, Kentucky sits midway between Louisville and Lexington, while Tallahassee was chosen as the midpoint between Pensacola and St. Augustine, then Florida's two largest cities. Ottawa straddles the boundary between the former colonies of English-speaking Upper Canada and French-speaking Lower Canada, a line that still separates Ontario and Quebec. Jefferson City, Missouri was selected in 1821, the year after Missouri joined the Union, for its central spot almost halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis, though Kansas City was not incorporated until 1850. The other path is building outright to escape an old capital's problems. Akmola, renamed Astana in 1998, became Kazakhstan's capital in 1997 after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Naypyidaw rose in Burma's interior when Rangoon was claimed to be overcrowded.

• 6. Strange And Split Capitals

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  Plymouth in Montserrat is a ghost town that remains the de jure capital of its territory, the strangest case in a long catalogue of unusual arrangements. South Africa runs three capitals at once: Pretoria for administration, Cape Town for legislation, and Bloemfontein for the judiciary, the outcome of the compromise that created the Union of South Africa in 1910. Even so, the Constitutional Court of South Africa sits in Johannesburg, the largest city, not in the judicial capital. India layers these splits across its states. Jammu and Kashmir shifts its entire state machinery every six months between Srinagar in summer and Jammu in winter. Punjab and Haryana share Chandigarh, a city administered as a Union territory, while Kerala keeps its high court in Ernakulam apart from the capital Thiruvananthapuram. Other governments move their offices away from the nameplate capital. Belmopan was designated Belize's national capital in 1971, yet most government offices and embassies stay in Belize City, and Dodoma became Tanzania's capital in 1996 while embassies remained in Dar es Salaam. Malaysia keeps Kuala Lumpur as the constitutional capital and home of the King, but moved the federal administrative centre and judiciary 30 km south to Putrajaya. The Netherlands offers the cleanest split of all: Amsterdam is the constitutional capital while the government, parliament, supreme court, Council of State, and the King's work palace all sit in The Hague.

• 7. Contested And Claimed

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  Nicosia is "the last divided capital", split in two by the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus, also called the Green Line. The Republic of Cyprus controls the south and the largely unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus controls North Nicosia, yet both claim the entire city. Jerusalem is contested at the level of two peoples. Both the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim it as their capital. Jerusalem serves as Israel's capital, holding the presidential residence, government offices, supreme court, and the Knesset, while the Palestinian Authority has no de facto or de jure control over any of it. Most countries treat the city's final status as unsettled pending negotiations and keep their missions to Israel in Tel Aviv, with missions to Palestine scattered across Ramallah, Gaza City, Cairo, and Damascus. The United States is the notable exception, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Names can encode old conquests too. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is thought to come from Taani linn, once "Danish Castle" and now "Danish Town", after the Toompea Castle that Denmark held in 1219-1227-1238-1332, and 1340-1346.

• 8. Capitals As Targets And Symbols

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  Athens was ruined and almost uninhabited when it became the capital of newly independent Greece in 1834, four years after independence, chosen to revive the glory of Ancient Greece. The capital had become a symbol, and its selection a highly symbolic act rather than the medieval habit of declaring a capital wherever a monarch held court. Peter the Great moved his government from Moscow to Saint Petersburg to give the Russian Empire a European orientation, and the Ming emperors moved from the more central Nanjing to Beijing to supervise the Mongol border. In India, rebels in the 1857 rebellion claimed Delhi and proclaimed Bahadur Shah Zafar emperor while the British ruled from Calcutta; Delhi became the colonial capital only after the Coronation Durbar of King-Emperor George V in 1911, then served independent India from 1947. The symbol becomes a battlefield in wartime. Capturing a capital usually guarantees capture of much of the enemy government, so it is typically a primary target. In ancient China's centralized bureaucracies a dynasty could fall with its capital; both Shu and Wu fell when Chengdu and Jianye fell, and the Ming ended when Li Zicheng took Beijing. The risk runs the other way too. France's centralized bureaucracy could coordinate far-flung resources, giving it a powerful advantage over less coherent rivals, but it courted utter ruin if Paris were ever taken.