It is the centre of wealth and power in the UK, but its rule is not benign.
By then Holland's greatest commercial town and port, as well as the granary of the northern Netherlands, Amsterdam had become a centre of wealth and influence in Europe.
"Urban areas make up a relatively small part of the global land area; but they are the centre of wealth, so damage to urban infrastructure could result in potentially large economic losses," he said.
However brilliant such folk are at identifying unconscious biases and concocting quota schemes, they may have little grasp of the virtues that turned the Valley, for all its faults, into the world's greatest centre of wealth creation.
She has proved remarkably successful at bullying San Jose politicians and raising questions the cyber elite would rather forget, such as why wages for the low-paid in the world's centre of wealth creation are falling.
But Fennell has built an international name – he has concessions in all the major centres of new wealth, Dubai, Moscow and Uzbekistan among them.
Writing in the Daily Mail, the political columnist Peter Oborne suggested that Goldsmith represented a familiar type from London's centres of inherited wealth, of "none too bright" men who lead "agreeable but empty lives".
For people like Sayed, living in villages and cities outside of Egypt's centres of power and wealth, that crisis has already arrived.
They present themselves as the defenders of popular justice and advocates of the poor and claim not to be affiliated to the centres of power or wealth.
