A truly dense population can not be sustained in a location without local resources unless there is a way to import at least the necessities for survival from somewhere else where they are more abundant.
Some of the best places for that, naturally are port cities, and for millennia merchant marine moves more goods more sensibly than most.
Inland cities can get big more easily when there are abundant local resources, well developed, and if there is some huge excess of something like timber, coal, gold, or whatever that is widely desirable. A local market will develop first in the land of abundance. Then if it's possible to arbitrage in a world market, the cost will be paid to shuttle commodities to an international port. Where the trading merchants will be able to buy low and sell high in a way that is further out of reach for the local producers.
Eventually the traders make more money on the same tonnage of natural resource flow than the extractors do, but the extractors got there first.
Depending on what the resource owners do with that early advantage, and whether there is a regime in place which values the local resource more than human life, and stuff like that has a much bigger effect on the imbalance between producer and trader, as well as local versus international prosperity, and that's with raw commodities not yet subject to value-added manufacturing.
Seems to me port cities mostly arose due to upstream export needs before they were utilized as major import hubs and mercantile centers.
I say it's the cheapness and abundance of commodities that makes it easier to add value for quite a long chain, and when you get into manufacturing it can be a big jump.
Services, technology and education are all worth money on their own but it does seem to take quite a bit of resource abundance at some point for somebody to be able to pay the bills.
Especially when resources were developed generations ago, there can be so many layers between the commodity and the consumer that things like service, tech, and education can be valued in their affect on each other without any direct correlation to a particular commodity or manufactured product.
All wealth arises from natural resources.
A truly dense population can not be sustained in a location without local resources unless there is a way to import at least the necessities for survival from somewhere else where they are more abundant.
Some of the best places for that, naturally are port cities, and for millennia merchant marine moves more goods more sensibly than most.
Inland cities can get big more easily when there are abundant local resources, well developed, and if there is some huge excess of something like timber, coal, gold, or whatever that is widely desirable. A local market will develop first in the land of abundance. Then if it's possible to arbitrage in a world market, the cost will be paid to shuttle commodities to an international port. Where the trading merchants will be able to buy low and sell high in a way that is further out of reach for the local producers.
Eventually the traders make more money on the same tonnage of natural resource flow than the extractors do, but the extractors got there first.
Depending on what the resource owners do with that early advantage, and whether there is a regime in place which values the local resource more than human life, and stuff like that has a much bigger effect on the imbalance between producer and trader, as well as local versus international prosperity, and that's with raw commodities not yet subject to value-added manufacturing.
Seems to me port cities mostly arose due to upstream export needs before they were utilized as major import hubs and mercantile centers.