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The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World
by Tristram Hunt
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The ambition of this book is also to explain how those ideologies of Empire were made flesh through the urban form and habits of city life. As the historian Partha Chatterjee has written, 'empire is not an abstract universal category. . . It is embodied and experienced in actual locations'.18 The shifting justifications and contested understandings of Empire shaped the design and planning, the sport and pastimes, the rhetoric and politics of Britain's colonial cities. The manner in which settlers and indigenous residents interacted and the way in which those dynamics shaped the fabric and culture of the city allows for a more accurate account of the day-to-day realities of imperialism. Urban history helps to move us beyond casting the indigenous victims of colonialism as just that–passive recipients of metropolitan, European designs in which they had neither voice nor influence.
Working chronologically and then (broadly) geographically from west to east, the following chapters trace the history of these cities, their ruling ideas and their place within the story of British imperialism. We begin with Boston as the entry-point into the First British Empire, which stretched along the Atlantic seaboard of America, and the remarkable cultural affiliation which existed between the mother country and Massachusetts right up to the American Revolution of 1776. Bridgetown, Barbados highlights the importance of the slave trade in the financing of both British imperialism and then industrialization during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dublin is the third city of this Atlantic triangle, highlighting the complex place of Ireland within British imperial history as well as London's late eighteenth-century ambition to unite the British Isles before embarking upon its grander global ambitions.
Any such aspirations depended upon the ability of the Royal Navy to see off competing imperial powers, and the fight against the Dutch to take the city of Cape Town is a microcosm of the broader, geo-political struggle that the forces of Western Europe played out across the high seas. With the capture of Cape Town, Britain's 'Swing to the East' was secure, and Calcutta, the capital of British India, next introduces the East India Company and the beginnings of the Raj. If Calcutta signified mercantilism, then Hong Kong was a testament to free trade, standing as a monument to the new ideologies of laissez-faire and the instrument of Britain's 'informal empire' in China. For all the lofty rhetoric, however, the colony's finances were dependent upon the distribution of opium across the Middle Kingdom. To begin with, the poppies came from Bengal, until the advent of Malwa opium brought the city of Bombay into the drug economy. Opium and then cotton production turned Bombay into one of the first industrial cities of the British Empire and, accompanying it, all the attendant problems of urban sanitation and mass immigration. The history of Victorian Bombay chronicles the mid-nineteenth-century relationship between colonial modernity and industrial capitalism.
Melbourne was another port in that global, commercial nexus: the development of the 'Queen-city of the south' signals the emergence of finance capital in British imperialism and highlights the very different place the White Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) had within the colonial firmament; the colony of Victoria was one strand of a 'crimson thread of kinship' uniting the Anglo-Saxon family. By contrast, the Edwardian Raj was about the assertion of power and authority, and no city in the world symbolized this imperial sensibility with more grandeur and world-historic self-regard than New Delhi. It was built as a monument to eternal imperial governance and yet barely finished it became the capital of an independent India. The final chapter analyses the end of Empire and the harrowing effect which decolonization had on a colonial city within the British Isles. Few places prospered more aggressively from Britain's imperial markets and global reach than Liverpool, and no city suffered more wretchedly from the end of Empire. The Janus face of Empire, its dual ability both to enrich and undo, is only now being overcome along the docks and wharfs of an otherwise often silent River Mersey.
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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