How does Ankh-Morpork support its huge population?
A million people is fairly respectable in the modern world, but Ankh-Morpork is still essentially in a pre-industrial setting – there are no railways or steamships to bring in food. Ok, there have been big pre-industrial cities like Imperial Rome, but they had to rely on things like huge annual grain fleets grown by armies of slaves. Ankh-Morpork is just a city state and doesn’t control a huge amount of territory. • They are the center of practically all the world trade. Just about anything going from somewhere to anywhere else goes through Ankh-Morpork, if they aren’t immediate neighbours. Ships, barges and cartloads enter the city every day by thousands to trade their goods. Read for example Night Watch – it mentions how the city’s economy works. The other newer books also include occasional mentions, but not quite so many. • That explains why Ankh-Morpork is rich, but it doesn’t really explain how it sustains itself – most food can only go so far without spoiling. There is no reliab
