Amsterdam
The first capital-market city.
Kernel
Amsterdam is the city that put the financial primitives invented in Venice and Florence into mass production. The Dutch East India Company (VOC, 1602) was the first joint-stock company tradable on a secondary market — the Amsterdam Stock Exchange (also 1602) was the first market for those shares. The Bank of Amsterdam (1609) standardized account money. For roughly a century the Dutch Republic was, per capita, the wealthiest society that had ever existed, and Amsterdam was its operating system.
Why it rose
Antwerp's sack by Spanish forces in 1576 sent its Protestant merchant population, capital, and skills north to Amsterdam. The Dutch Revolt's victory secured a republic with no aristocracy, low transaction costs, and tolerant immigration policy. Add windmill-powered industrial sawing of Baltic timber, fluyt ship design (a low-crew freighter), and the world's first sustained interest rates below 4%.
What it gave the world
The joint-stock company. The stock market. The central bank's logic of account money. The first sustained newspaper culture and a printing industry that published the European Enlightenment when it was illegal at home. Spinoza, Descartes (who wrote Discours de la méthode in Leiden), Huygens, and Leeuwenhoek were Amsterdam-network thinkers in fact if not always in residence.
Why it declined
Three Anglo-Dutch wars (1652–74) and then the financial demands of resisting Louis XIV exhausted the republic. London, by 1700, had absorbed the Dutch financial innovations and added population, navy, and colonial demand. By the 18th century, Dutch capital was being lent to British borrowers rather than deployed by Dutch traders. The intellectual habit of finance survived; its center moved across the Channel.