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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

But what's interesting, most of historic capitals happen to be not coastal, and often a bit more to the north than you would expect of comfort zone.

Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Berlin. For some reason, coastal cities don't have this push to form a state.

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I have no idea about Beijing or Moscow, but Paris, Berlin, and London were all located on swamps/marshes.

Moscow region is swampy all right. And I've heard that Washington DC (being an artificial capital) is located on a swamp too.

I think the reason is simple, "Braindead" style. It's just that lizard folk prefer the marshes, so that's where we have to be.

Hence the "Drain the swamp" political rhetoric of the last US election cycle.

FWIW, Berlin and Moscow both mean "Swamp Town".

The reason is simple. Swamps are commercially strategic, since they're located on rivers.

For most of history, shipping goods over land didn't make much sense.

This makes perfect sense, I guess they are swamps because that's the combination of rivers and flat ground

We would have Berlin on Rhine and Moscow on Volga river then. Much better climate and much busier rivers commercially.

For some reason, capitals tend to be on undesirable rivers.

...if this was the only condition for "what city becomes a capital." Looking at Germany, there's Hamburg, Köln, München...all on nice rivers, but none of them were the capital of Prussia when Germany was first unified - since Prussia was the essential driver of that political process, Berlin became the capital. Something of a coincidence in the grand scheme of things, really.

For some reason, it's usually a faraway landlocked province that triggers unification. Not the rich and coastal ones.

Turin-Savoy in Italy, Prussia in Germany.

Canberra also.

Moscow is located on a big river that used to be a major trade route.

Beijing has multiple rivers traversing the current municipal area, and they were dammed and directed into channels, or directed underground as the city grew (same for London, by the way - London has multiple historical rivers that are now entirely or almost entirely underground, not just the Thames)

> But what's interesting, most of historic capitals happen to be not coastal, and often a bit more to the north than you would expect of comfort zone.

Cities are created by commerce, capitals are created by war. A state isn't going to last very long with its capital on the front lines.

All set on rivers, which makes transport with small boats viable, and provides access to fresh-water.

Coasts are harsher environments, and requires bigger ships / more crew for safe/efficient transport.

It also had large defensive considerations as large ships became viable but we still did not have large/fast land-based transportation.

London, Rome, Athens, Lisbon, Dublin, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Venice, the list goes on and on (with the last two historic capitals being right in the water, not even coastal; and while I'm aware that Venice is not a capital these days, theirs was a formidable empire)

London, Rome and Athens don't strike me as seaports. They're somewhere not far from the sea, but not on the coast.

Venice reinforces my point, if anything. It was more like a large corporation than an empire, and then it failed to produce a nation state.

Istanbul is not a capital of Turkey. Before that it was a city-state of Constantinople for a long time.

London used to be the seaport of England (before railways outsourced this to Southampton); whence do you consider the name Docklands (the huge area downriver of the Tower)? The rest is just nitpicking ("modern Piraeus is not part of Athens") and moving the goalposts (first it's "historic capitals", now it doesn't matter because Istanbul is not a de-iure capital at present, even though it de-facto is? Plus, there's a major stretch of history between Constantinople and present day)

Maybe because boats didn't used to be particularly good at seafaring?

Dunno!

Good harbors happen to be full of wetlands. The current reality, where there are practically no wetlands near large coastal cities, is very artificial.

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