ABSTRACT
Many of the largest cities in the world today are creatures of British colonialismBombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Singapore and Lagos, to mention some of those in developing countries. They are links in a world economy and global network of cities, through which trade and production is organized. Braudel (1984, chapter 1), in his great study of world history from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, has shown how, by the late eighteenth century, the ‘octopus grip of European trade had extended to cover the whole world’. He has linked this to the existence of a dominant capitalist city: London by 1775, he says unequivocally, was ‘the centre of the world’. The parts of the world economy each developed their own core, middle zone and periphery, each with its dominant city. Friedmann (1986) has formulated a present-day version of world-economy theory with his world-city hypothesis. Recent academic work now combines world-city theory with colonial urban development theory (King, 1990), to recognize the importance of ports in the development of colonial and post-colonial economic systems.
