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The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World
by Tristram Hunt
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The danger now is that, as the legacy of Empire moves into the realm of official apologies, law suits and compensation settlements, the space for detached historical judgement has perceptibly narrowed. For the history of Empire is always more complicated than the simple binary of ruler and ruled–as episodes such as the loss of America in 1776, the tortured psychology of the settlers of the White Dominions, or the endlessly unclear place of Ireland within the British imperial imagination demonstrated. What is more, as Linda Colley has suggested, 'one of the reasons why we all need to stop approaching empire in simple "good" or "bad" thing terms, and instead think intelligently and enquiringly about its many and intrinsic paradoxes, is that versions of the phenomenon are still with us'.13
The most compelling of those phenomena still with us is the chain of former colonial cities dotted across the globe. From the Palladian glories of Leinster House in Dublin to the Ruskinian fantasia of the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai to the stucco campanile of Melbourne's Government House to the harbour of Hong Kong, the footprint of the old British Empire remains wilfully in evidence. After sporting pastimes and the English language (to which might be added Anglicanism, the parliamentary system and Common Law), Jan Morris has described urbanism as 'the most lasting of the British imperial legacies'.14 And this imperial heritage is now being preserved and restored at a remarkable rate as postcolonial nations engage in a frequently more sophisticated conversation about the virtues and vices, the legacies and burdens of the British past and how they should relate to it today.
This book seeks to explore that imperial story through the urban form and its material culture: ten cities telling the story of the British Empire. It charts the changing character of British imperialism through the architecture and civic institutions, the street names and fortifications, the news pages, plays and ritual. And it is the very complexity of this urban past which allows us to go beyond the 'good' and 'bad' cul-de-sac of so much imperial debate. The history of colonialism covered in this study suggests a more diffuse process of exchange, interaction and adaptation. The historian John Darwin has described Empire as 'not just a story of domination and subjection but something more complicated: the creation of novel or hybrid societies in which notions of governance, economic assumptions, religious values and morals, ideas about property, and conceptions of justice, conflicted and mingled, to be reinvented, refashioned, tried out or abandoned'.15 This nuanced account of negotiation and exchange is nowhere more obvious than in the advanced intellectual and cultural environment of the British imperial city–in the Indo-Saracenic architecture of Bombay, the east African mosques of Cape Town, or the Bengali Renaissance which British scholarship helped to foster in Calcutta.
The history of these cities also exposes how the justifications and understandings of imperialism changed across time and space. As English and then British imperial ambitions developed from the late sixteenth century, so the intellectual rationale of the leading advocates of Empire evolved. The motivation of the planters in early seventeenth-century Ulster would have seemed entirely foreign to the free-traders of nineteenth-century Hong Kong or to the White Dominion troops fighting for Empire in the First World War. Yet the presence of these often cumulative and sometimes competing sets of motives does not mean that the British Empire lacked ideology. There has been a long and often disingenuous history of imperial commentators expressing their amazement at the full extent of Britain's colonial ambitions. In 1762 Horace Walpole marvelled at how 'a peaceable, quiet set of tradesfolks' had become the 'heirs-apparent to the Romans and overrunning East and West Indies'. In the nineteenth century, the Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley famously described the British Empire as the product of 'a fit of absence of mind'. And a more recent history of Empire suggests it all emerged through a process of 'anarchic individualism'.16 In fact, during every stage in the development of Britain's imperial ambitions there were political philosophies, moral certainties, theologies and ideologies at hand to promote and explain the extension of Britain's global reach. At times Britain was a mercantilist empire, at other times a free-trading empire; in certain periods, Great Britain was involved in a process of promoting Western civilization, at others in protecting multicultural relativism; for a good period prior to the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, Britain regarded itself as an empire of righteous exploitation, and afterwards part of a selfless crusade for liberty. As Joseph Conrad's Marlow acerbically notes in Conrad's peerless novella of colonial realism Heart of Darkness, it was an idea that had to redeem the practice of empire at any particular point: 'An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence, but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea–something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.'17 Down the centuries, it is possible to trace contentious debates in public, press and parliament about the purpose and nature of imperialism: its costs and benefits, its relationship to British identity and its strategic and economic requirements. There were complaints that Empire benefited a narrow mercantile elite at the expense of the public purse; that it involved arbitrary and abusive systems of political rule that threatened historic British liberties; or that it was Britain's divine mission to spread commerce and Christianity abroad.
Excerpted from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt. Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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