Modern City-States and Small Sovereign Territories

A city-state is a sovereign or largely self-governing state the size of a city and the land around it. Monaco, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Channel Island of Sark govern themselves at a scale most countries would call a suburb, and each arrived there by a different route: inheritance, treaty, empire, secession or accident. Long before anyone proposed building a Free City, these already existed.

They are not models anyone designed, which is exactly what makes them useful. Every argument about whether a city-sized jurisdiction can raise revenue, defend itself, hold a legal system together or survive a change of ruler has already been tested in at least one of these places, in public, over decades.

This hub gathers what those cases show: how Monaco funds itself without income tax, why Hong Kong’s autonomy proved reversible, what happened when Sark ended feudal rule in 2008, and how Dubai turned a set of free zones into a magnet for people who could live anywhere. Their histories are covered under History of Free Cities; here the question is how they work today.