Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World

By Tristram Hunt

An original history of the most enduring colonial creation, the city, explored through ten portraits of powerful urban centers the British Empire left in its wake

At its peak, the British Empire was an urban civilization of epic proportions, leaving behind a network of cities which now stand as the economic and cultural powerhouses of the twenty-first century. In a series of ten vibrant urban biographies that stretch from the shores of Puritan Boston to Dublin, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Liverpool, and beyond, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt demonstrates that urbanism is in fact the most lasting of Britain's imperial legacies.
Combining historical scholarship, cultural criticism, and personal reportage, Hunt offers a new history of empire, excavated from architecture and infrastructure, from housing and hospitals, sewers and statues, prisons and palaces. Avoiding the binary verdict of empire as "good" or "bad," he traces the collaboration of cultures and traditions that produced these influential urban centers, the work of an army of administrators, officers, entrepreneurs, slaves, and renegades. In these ten cities, Hunt shows, we also see the changing faces of British colonial settlement: a haven for religious dissenters, a lucrative slave-trading post, a center of global hegemony.
Lively, authoritative, and eye-opening, Cities of Empire makes a crucial new contribution to the history of colonialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9780805096002

Tristram Hunt

Tristram Hunt is the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and one of Britain’s best-known historians. His previous books, which include Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World and Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, have been published in more than a dozen languages. Until taking on the leadership of the V&A, he served as Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent, the home of Wedgwood’s potteries. A senior lecturer in British history at Queen Mary University of London, he appears regularly on BBC radio and television.

Book preview

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To M.D.E.H.

List of Illustrations

INSERTS

1. Paul Revere and Christian Remick, A View of Part of the Town of Boston in New England and British ships of war landing troops, 1768. (Photograph: Historic New England, Boston/The Bridgeman Art Library)

2. Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th, 1770. (Photograph: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC)

3. Sidney Smith, A View of John Hancock’s House across Boston Common in 1768. (Photograph: New York Public Library/The Bridgeman Art Library)

4. John Singleton Copley, Samuel Adams, 1770. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/The Bridgeman Art Library)

5. Teapot, probably made in Derby, Staffordshire, c. 1765–1770s. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Museum Purchase (accession # 1953–417, image #DS90–557).

6. The Boston Tea Party, illustration from Rev. W. D. Cooper, The History of North America, 1789. (Photograph: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC)

7. St Nicholas Abbey, Barbados. (Photograph: Spectrum/Heritage Images/Scala, Florence)

8. Anon, View of Bridgetown and Carlisle Bay (‘Governor Robinson Going to Church’), c. 1742. By courtesy of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society

9. Thomas Rowlandson after ‘E.D.’, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes, 1796. The Royal Collection, copyright © 2014 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

10. James Malton, View of Leinster House, Dublin, 1792. Private Collection. (Photograph: The Stapleton Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

11. Edward Smyth, pediment and frieze for the Custom House, Dublin, 1791. (Photograph: Michael Fewer/South Dublin County Libraries, T. J. Byrne Collection)

12. Strickland Lowry (attr.), An Interior with Members of a Family, 1770s. (Photograph: by courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)

13. Francis Wheatley, The Irish House of Commons, 1780. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Lotherton Hall). (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

14. William Hodges, View of Cape Town & Table Mountain, 1772. William Fehr Collection Castle of Good Hope, Iziko Museums of South Africa (Acc. no. CD21). (Photograph: Africa Media Online)

15. Thomas Whitcombe, The East Indiamen ‘Minerva’, ‘Scaleby Castle’ and ‘Charles Grant’ off Cape Town, 1820. (Photograph: copyright © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

16. Francis Swaine after Jan van Ryne, View of the Old Fort William as seen from the opposite bank of the Hooghly, c. 1763. British Library, London. (Photograph: The Art Archive)

17. Indian School, Sir David Ochterlony in Indian dress, smoking a hookah and watching a nautch in his house in Delhi, c. 1820. British Library, London. (Photograph: The Art Archive/Eileen Tweedy)

18. James Gillray, The Bengal Levée, showing Lord Charles Cornwallis holding reception at the Old Government House, Calcutta, 1792. (Photograph: The Art Archive/Eileen Tweedy)

19. Thomas Lawrence, Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley, 1813. The Royal Collection, copyright © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

20. Charles D’Oyly, View of Government House, illustration from Views of Calcutta and its Environs, 1848. (Photograph: Getty Images)

21. Chinese School, The Opium Clipper ‘Waterwitch’ in Calcutta, c. 1850. Sze Yuan Tang Collection. (Photograph: Martyn Gregory Gallery, London)

22. Bilingual text from the Treaty of Nanking, 1842. National Archives, Kew. (Photograph: Topfoto/HIP)

23. Chinese School, East Point, Hong Kong, with the residence and godowns of Jardine, Matheson and Company, mid-nineteenth century. (Photograph: Martyn Gregory Gallery, London)

24. Marciano Baptista, A view of Hong Kong harbour, 1860s. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. Museum Purchase, 1961. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

25. John Thomson, Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, from the clock tower looking towards the east, c. 1868. (Photograph: Wellcome Library, London)

26. George Chinnery, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy with his Chinese servant, c. 1830s. Private collection.

27. Parsi cotton merchants of Bombay, illustration from Robert Brown, The Countries of the World, late nineteenth century. (Photograph: Topfoto)

28. George Reid, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, 1881. (Photograph: copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London)

29. Raja Deendayal, View of Bombay showing the Municipal Corporation Building and Victoria Terminus, c. 1893. (Photograph: copyright © The Raja Deendayal Foundation)

30. Sir George Gilbert Scott, Bombay University Library, 1878. (Photograph: Benjamin Matthijs Lichtwerk/Getty Images)

31. William Emerson and Lockwood Kipling, water fountain, 1869. Crawford Market, Mumbai. (Photograph: Garrett Ziegler)

32. Henry Gritten, Melbourne viewed from the Botanic Garden, 1867. (Photograph: State Library of Victoria, Melbourne)

33. N. J. Caire, Monsieur Caron conducting the Exhibition choir, performing the Exhibition Cantata at the opening of the International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1881. (Photograph: State Library of Victoria, Melbourne)

34. Sands & McDougall Limited, Tramway map of Melbourne and Suburbs, 1880s. (Photograph: State Library of Victoria, Melbourne)

35. Lord Sheffield’s Australian cricket team, 1891–2. (Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library/Graham Hales Collection)

36. Parade of soldiers, Collins Street, Melbourne, c. 1915. (Photograph: Mirrorpix)

37. The Nizam of Hyderabad paying homage to George V and Queen Mary at the Delhi Durbar, 1911. (Photograph: Topfoto/HIP)

38. Aerial view of Kingsway (Rajpath) looking due East, New Delhi, 1947. (Photograph: courtesy of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge)

39. View of the east end of the North Secretariat Block with the Council House in the background, New Delhi. (Photograph: RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

40. Gandhi and Mountbatten at the Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, 1947. (Photograph: courtesy of The Trustees of the Broadlands Archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton)

41. Poster for the Dominion Line, 1899. (Photograph: Topfoto/HIP)

42. View outside the Chinese shops in Pitt Street, Liverpool, illustration from Herman Scheffauer, ‘The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem’, in The London Magazine, June 1911. (Photograph: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Per.2705 d.85 26 (1911) p.466))

43. Walter Richards, Modern Liverpool, 1907. World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

44. Police move in on rioters in Toxteth, Liverpool, July 1981. (Photograph: Rex Features/ Associated Newspapers)

45. Visualization of the Peel Group plan for Liverpool Waters. (Photograph: courtesy of Rust Studios/www.ruststudios.co.uk)

TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

The Royal Yacht Britannia in Hong Kong harbour, 1997. (Photograph: Getty Images)

Henry Pelham, Plan of Boston in New England with its environs, 1777. (Photograph: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library)

Slaves processing sugar cane, illustration from Histoire générale des Antilles habités par les Français, 1667–71. The British Library, London. (Photograph: The Art Archive)

Richard Ligon, A topographicall description and admeasurement of the yland of Barbados in the West Indyaes with the mrs. names of the seuerall plantacons, from A True & exact history of the island of Barbadoes, 1673. (Photograph: The Librarian, University of Glasgow Library (Sp.Coll. Hunterian K.3.3))

The first coin struck for commercial use in Barbados, 1788. (Photograph: Heritage Auctions)

Wide Streets Commission, Elevation of the west front and plan of Mountjoy Square, Dublin, 1787. (Photograph: Dublin City Library & Archive (WSC/Maps/63))

Henry Brocas Snr (attr.), after Samuel Frederick Brocas, View of the Four Courts from Merchant’s Quay, Dublin, 1818. (Photograph: courtesy of the National Library of Ireland (Call No. ET C115))

Sackville Street, Post Office and Nelsons Column, illustration from George Newenham Wright, An Historical Guide to ancient and modern Dublin, 1821. (Photograph: Aberdeen University Library Special Collections (KK.rr.13 no.1))

Van de Graaff, Thiebault and Barbier, Plan van Het Cassteel en de Stad, de Goede Hoop (Plan of the Castle and Town of Good Hope), 1786. (Photograph: The Western Cape Archives and Records Service (Ref. M1/339))

Lady Anne Barnard, Panorama of Cape Town (detail), 1797–9. Private collection.

William Marshall Craig (after), View of the Cape of Good Hope: The Battle previous to the Surrender, 8 January 1806. National Army Museum, London. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

W. S. Sherwill (after), A drying room in the opium factory in Patna, India, c. 1850. (Photograph: Wellcome Library, London)

Unveiling a statue of the Prince of Wales presented to the City of Bombay by Alfred Sassoon, from The Illustrated London News, 1879.

Four suburban house plans, from Sands and McDougall, The Melbourne Directory, 1885.

‘Enderby’, the residence of William John Mountain Esq., in south Melbourne, 1888. (Photograph: National Library of Australia (ref. an8711798))

Sir Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens on an elephant, 1913. (Photograph: RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

Edwin Lutyens, ‘Layout Plan of Imperial Delhi from Government House to Purana Kila’, c. 1920s. Whereabouts unknown.

List of Maps

The Growth and Decline of the British Empire

Boston, c. 1750s

Bridgetown, c. 1760s

Dublin, c. 1800s

Cape Town, c. 1800s

Calcutta, c. 1810s

Hong Kong, c. 1850s

Bombay, c. 1880s

Melbourne, c. 1900s

New Delhi, c. 1930s

Liverpool, c. 1940s

Acknowledgements

For their generous assistance with the research, writing and production of this book, the author would like to thank James Baker, Chris Bayly, Sara Bershtel, Paul Bew, Vivian Bickford, Chloe Campbell, Georgina Capel, Michael V. Carlisle, James Cronin, Thi Dinh, Richard Duguid, Donald Futers, Carrie Gibson, Julia Hobsbawm, Riva Hocherman, Julian and Marylla Hunt, Jennifer Huntington, Shruti Kapila, Peter Kilfoyle, Alan Lockey, Cecilia Mackay, Carrie Martin, Rana Mitter, Ruaridh Nicoll, Michael Parkinson, Stuart Proffitt, Gaye Blake Roberts, Hannah O’Rourke, Miri Rubin and the Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London, Claire Sandars, Ben Shephard, Owen Stanwood, Rory Stewart, Phil Tinline, Juliet Thornback, Imogen Walford, Ian Wason, David Watson, Alison Wedgwood, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Jon Wilson.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Boston

2 Bridgetown

3 Dublin

4 Cape Town

5 Calcutta

6 Hong Kong

7 Bombay

8 Melbourne

9 New Delhi

10 Liverpool

Photographs

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Also by Tristram Hunt

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

On a sharp winter’s day in December 2010, the Hong Kong Association and Society held its annual luncheon in London’s Hyde Park. The venue, of course, was the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, part of the Jardine Matheson group, perched lucratively amidst the billionaires’ playground of Knightsbridge, and all the great tai-pans of British corporate life were in attendance. However, the Association’s guest of honour was not some old China hand, flown in from the Hong Kong Club, to wax lyrical about Britain’s ‘easternmost possession’. Instead, it was the tall, suave and studiously loyal ambassador of the People’s Republic of China, His Excellency Mr Liu Xiaoming.

In syrupy diplomatese, Beijing’s man in London spoke rhapsodically of the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ and the achievements of British business in building up the colony, and then reaffirmed his government’s commitment to the vision of Hong Kong proclaimed by Deng Xiaoping: one country, two systems. Communist China would not impose ‘Mao Zedong thought’ on Hong Kong. Instead, it was determined to preserve freedom of speech, the rule of law, private property rights and, above all, the low-tax, free-trade model that underpinned the once-imperial city’s prosperity. The future of this ‘international city’ was as a global finance centre and, for British companies, as a bridge to mainland China. A pleasing statement of business as usual, the message was smartly tailored to the merchant princes of the Mandarin Oriental.

Thirteen years earlier, when Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease on Hong Kong came to an end, there was little evidence of such Sino-British harmony. Then, it was all tears and angst, pride and regret. At the stroke of midnight the Union Jack was lowered to the strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, the Hong Kong police ripped the royal insignia from their uniforms, and Red Army troops poured over the border. Britain’s last governor, Chris Patten, recorded the final, colonial swansong in all its lachrymose glory: its ‘kilted pipers and massed bands, drenching rain, cheering crowds, a banquet for the mighty and the not so mighty, a goose-stepping Chinese honour guard, a president and a prince’. Steaming out of Victoria Harbour, as the Royal Marines played ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, on the last, symbolic voyage of the Royal Yacht Britannia, ‘we were leaving one of the greatest cities in the world, a Chinese city that was now part of China, a colony now returned to its mighty motherland in rather different shape to that in which it had become Britain’s responsibility a century and a half before’.¹

In London, responses to the handover ran the gamut, from anguished to humbled, emblematic, in a way, of the conflicted reexamination of Britain’s colonial legacy that has been underway for some years. At the shrill end of the spectrum: ‘The handover of Hong Kong to China strikes many westerners as a disgrace and a tragedy,’ thundered The Economist. ‘Never before has Britain passed a colony directly to a Communist regime that does not even pretend to respect conventional democratic values.’² Historian Paul Johnson, writing in the Daily Mail, concurred: ‘The surrender of the free colony of Hong Kong to the totalitarian Communist government is one of the most shameful and humiliating episodes in British history.’ The scuttle from Victoria Harbour gave Fleet Street just the cue it needed for an enjoyable bout of colonial self-indulgence. ‘All the rest of our empire has been given away on honourable terms,’ continued Johnson. ‘All the rest of our colonies were meticulously prepared for independence, by setting up model parliaments … and by providing a judiciary professionally educated on British lines to maintain the rule of law.’ Shamefully, the same could not be said of Hong Kong.³

The end of the line. Her Majesty’s Ship the Royal Yacht Britannia sails at Hong Kong harbour, 23 June 1997. The ship, which became the floating base for Prince Charles, arrived a week before the territory was to be handed back to China after more than 150 years of British rule (1997).

Other brave commentators suggested there might be a more complex pre-history to this handover. Author Martin Jacques thought the ceremony showed, ‘no sense of contrition, of humility, of history. This was British hypocrisy at its most rampant and sentimental.’⁴ Instead of a moment of self-regard and imperial nostalgia, the journalist Andrew Marr thought this final, colonial retreat should have been an opportunity for a new British identity to emerge. ‘So enough Last Posts and folded Union Flags. Enough Britannia and enough weary self-deprecation from the Prince of Wales. We should not leave Hong Kong with too much regret.’⁵

In his memoirs, Prime Minister Tony Blair admits to a startling failure to appreciate the historic significance of the return of Hong Kong to China, as a rising, newly prosperous country sought to take its place in the world and shed the memory of its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of British, French and American forces.* After President Jiang Zemin teased the jet-lagged and jejune British premier about his poor knowledge of William Shakespeare

he then explained to me that this was a new start in UK/China relations and from now on, the past could be put behind us. I had, at that time, only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what the past was. I thought it was all just politeness in any case. But actually, he meant it. They meant it.⁶

However, one member of the British delegation remained determined to cling on to the past. In a confidential diary entry entitled ‘The Great Chinese Takeaway’, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales laid bare his despair at seeing the Crown colony returned to the mainland. Watching another piece fall from his family inheritance, the prince lamented the ‘ridiculous rigmarole’ of meeting the ‘old waxwork’ Jiang Zemin, and the horror of watching an ‘awful Soviet-style’ ceremony in which ‘Chinese soldiers goose-step on to the stage and haul down the Union Jack’. Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor knew all too well that, when his time came to assume the throne, the loss of Hong Kong meant Britain’s imperial role would be long past. ‘Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.’⁷

*   *   *

As Great Britain’s formal empire finally receded into the distance, the public debate about the legacies and meaning of that colonial past has grown only more agonized.⁸ Famously, in his 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, the historian Niall Ferguson made a stirring and influential case for the British Empire as the handmaiden of globalization and force for progress. ‘No organization has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world,’ he wrote. Since globalization and the modern world were, for Ferguson, a ‘good thing’, this also meant the British Empire – for all its messy crimes and misdemeanours – was equally praiseworthy. ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies.’ Much of the chaos of the twentieth century was, he suggested, a product of the decline of transnational empires. And he went on to urge the White House of President George W. Bush to take up what Kipling called ‘the white man’s burden’ and show some imperial leadership. For Ferguson, the British Empire offered the most salient guide for Washington’s diplomats and generals as they sought to craft their own Pax Americana across the Middle East.⁹

As critics pointed out, there were numerous problems with Ferguson’s version of empire: its Whiggish focus on the heroic age of Victorian achievement to the exclusion of the more amoral adventurism of the eighteenth century or bloody counter-insurgencies of the twentieth century; its unwillingness to chart the broader impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples; its concentration on the free-trade period of British imperialism as the Empire’s defining ethos; and its dichotomous, good versus bad balance-sheet approach to the past.

Yet just as unhelpful a side-effect of Ferguson’s case was that it provoked an equal and opposite reaction from scholars and commentators who sought, by way of contrast, to cast British imperialism as a very bad thing. In the context of political opposition to perceived American imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century, discussion about the British Empire (particularly on the political left) was reduced to slavery, starvation and extermination; loot, land and labour. In the words of the left-wing author Richard Gott, ‘the rulers of the British empire will one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale’.¹⁰

Much of Gott’s case has received official endorsement in recent years with a series of public acknowledgements by European governments of colonial crimes. In 2004 Germany apologized for the massacre of 65,000 Herero people in what is now Namibia; in 2008 Italy announced that it was to pay reparations to Libya for injustices committed during its thirty-year rule of the north African state (judged by Time magazine to be ‘an unprecedented act of contrition by a former European colonial power’); in 2011 the Dutch government apologized for the killing of civilians in the 1947 Rawagede massacre in Indonesia; and in 2012 the President of France, François Hollande, officially acknowledged the role of the Parisian police in massacring some 200 Algerians during a 1961 rally.¹¹ Then, in 2013, the United Kingdom government (having apologized for the Great Famine of 1845–52 and expressed official regret over Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade) was forced by a High Court judgement to announce a £20 million compensation package for 5,228 Kenyan victims of British abuse during the 1950s Kenya Emergency or Mau Mau Rebellion. ‘The British government recognizes that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,’ Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons. ‘The British Government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.’¹²

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.

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.

*   *   *

In one sense, an account of imperialism pursued through urban history is obvious. While colonization might have begun as a rural pursuit, primarily involved in the extraction of mineral or agricultural wealth from foreign lands, it could not prosper without the development of an urban infrastructure to ship the riches back home. Initially, this meant the establishment of ports – such as Bridgetown for sugar, Boston for fisheries or Melbourne for gold – and then the emergence of more complicated economies around them, from ship-building to financial services to foodstuffs, leisure and retail. With these early settlements came the first springs of civic ambition. In the pioneering Ulster plantations of the late sixteenth century, there were grand plans to erect a new capital, Elizabetha. Similarly, the promoters of the Berkeley Plantation in Virginia in 1619 commissioned their representative Captain John Woodleefe ‘to erect and build a town called Barkley and to settle and plant our men and diverse other inhabitants there, to the honour of Almighty God, the enlarging of Christian religion, and to the augmentation and revenue of the general plantation in that country, and the particular good and profit of ourselves, men and servants as we hope’.¹⁹ Neither of those planned cities came to fruition. But in colonies which did contain significant commercial and strategic assets, the resources allocated to cities by central authorities rapidly escalated to cover the erection of garrisons, and places of worship, the establishment of industry and all the accoutrements of settler life. Nine out of ten of the cities in this book began their imperial lives as port economies.²⁰

Most of them also attest to the defining attributes of colonial cities, as first set out by the urban historian Anthony D. King: power primarily in the hands of a non-indigenous minority; the relative superiority of this minority in terms of technological, military and organizational power; and the racial, cultural and religious differences between predominantly European, Christian settlers and the indigenous majority.²¹ In these terms, a history of British imperial cities could be matched by an account of their German, Spanish or, most usefully, French counterparts – with the development of, say, Pondicherry, Casablanca or Saigon offering equivalent insights into French imperial development. Of course, the impulses were different for each colonial power, and the totalizing nature of France’s ‘civilizing mission’ was recorded much more deliberately in those cities’ urban design and architecture.

Yet, whether it is Hong Kong or Mumbai, or indeed Shanghai or Dubai (two cities not included in this study), it is notable how Britain’s imperial cities currently play a far more significant role in world affairs than those of any other former European power. At the peak of British imperial dominion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economic and cultural driver of Empire was a chain of major colonial cities – Bombay, Singapore, Melbourne. The advent of the steamship and telegram network, the cutting of the Suez Canal and increase in shipping, the acceleration of global trade in the lead-up to the First World War and the role of these cities as entrepôt and export hubs gave them a powerful, semi-autonomous place within the imperial hierarchy as engines of global growth. Funds from London, Paris and Berlin finance houses were sunk into major infrastructure schemes – docks, railways, trams – as well as used to open up the colonial hinterland.

Today, one hundred years on, the world is witnessing a revival of the global city-state. Not only does the majority of the world’s population now live in urban areas (with tens of millions – across Africa, China and India – accelerating the rate of urbanization each passing year), the top twenty-three ‘megacities’ contribute by themselves some 14 per cent of global GDP.²² Urban theorist Saskia Sassen has identified ‘global cities’ – those cities that function as ‘command points in the organization of the world economy’, provide ‘key locations for specialized service firms’ and operate as ‘sites of production, including the production of innovations … and markets for the products and innovations produced’ – as the economic powerhouses of the modern era.²³ And, rather like the port cities of the European empires, they operate increasingly outside the traditional framework of the nation state. In an era of instant communications and capital asset flows, global cities such as London, New York and Shanghai are international entities in their own right; the advice from branding agencies and management consultants is for companies to think of future markets in terms of cities rather than countries. If today the twentieth-century nation state is under pressure from globalization, the transnational power of world cities – operating through their own cultural and economic networks – is enjoying its own resurgence.

Alongside a twenty-first-century girdle of global cities, the language of colonial cities has also come back to life. In recent years, the Stanford University economist Paul Romer has made the case for ‘Charter Cities’. ‘My idea is to build dozens, perhaps hundreds, of cities, each run by a new partnership between a rich country and a poor country,’ he has explained. ‘The poor country would give up some land for the city, while a developed country like Britain or Canada could contribute a credible judicial system that anchors the rule of law.’ Sound familiar? Romer is willing to admit that ‘to some this sounds like colonialism’. But there is no need to worry. ‘The developed partner country need not rule directly: residents of the city can administer the rules, so long as the well-established judiciary retains the final say, just as the Privy Council does for some members of the Commonwealth.’²⁴

If constructing a new generation of colonial cities might seem far-fetched, then what is happening in the former cities of the British Empire also strikes many critics as an unwelcome updating of discredited systems of colonial inequality.* The difference is that this time it is class rather than race shaping the urban fabric, as the segregation of the colonial period provides the antecedent for modern forms of apartheid now moulding the downtown districts, neighbourhoods and suburbs of postcolonial cities. Anthropologist and historian Mike Davis has condemned the restitution of ‘older logics of imperial control’ in developing cities. ‘Throughout the Third World, postcolonial elites have inherited and greedily reproduced the physical footprints of segregated colonial cities,’ he writes. ‘Despite rhetorics of national liberation and social justice, they have aggressively adapted the racial zoning of the colonial period to defend their own class privileges and spatial exclusivity.’²⁵

Similarly, in the cities of the metropole, the end of formal Empire has not meant the disappearance of colonial influence. The late Edward Said once asked, ‘Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities; and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India or Algeria upon these two imperial cities?’²⁶ So too with the port of Liverpool, the docks of Glasgow, the ‘merchant quarter’ of Bristol and the workshops of Birmingham. From the iconography of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, to Jamaica Street in Glasgow, to the funds supporting Matthew Boulton’s Soho House in Birmingham, the lineages of Empire continue to find a resonance in the contemporary civic fabric.

Increasingly, the British are beginning to appreciate that imperialism was not just something ‘we’ did to other people overseas, but a long, complex process that transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. As Nicholas B. Dirks has argued, ‘fundamental notions of European modernity – ideas of virtue, corruption, nationalism, sovereignty, economic freedom, governmentality, tradition, and history itself – derive in large part from the imperial encounter’.²⁷ Once again, these transformations can be charted most obviously in our cities. In contrast to a barren conversation about Empire being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing, we might reflect instead on how the processes of imperial exchange took place on these shores.

*   *   *

Not least because, as Prince Charles so painfully reflected, the final embers of Empire are almost extinguished. As a Member of Parliament, I see at first hand the uncomfortable realism of this position during the monthly ritual of parliamentary questions to the secretary of state for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While the architecture and iconography of the Palace of Westminster remain replete with the glories of Empire, question time is often little more than a rhetorical exercise in thwarted ambition: backbench Members of Parliament rise up demanding to know what Her Majesty’s Government will ‘do’ about tensions in the South China Seas or the occupied West Bank or the situation in Kashmir, as if the despatch of a Palmerstonian gunboat was still a credible option. The bombast tends to deflate when ministers dutifully respond with some warm words about the role of the European Union or the United Nations, or spell out the stark limitations of Britain’s military capacity. And when the British political class cannot have its way, its natural reflex point is a paroxysm of soul-searching about ‘our place in the world’. In the summer of 2013, a dispute with Spain over border entry into the British territory of Gibraltar (on the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ceded the Rock to Great Britain) and the decision by the House of Commons not to support military intervention in Syria was immediately framed within the context of colonial loss and imperial retreat.

Out beyond Westminster, the end of Empire is equally redolent – not least in my own parliamentary constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood had been instrumental in commissioning the Trent and Mersey Canal to transport ceramic tableware from the Potteries to the port of Liverpool, then to be shipped out across the Empire. And his competitors followed suit, with the sturdy designs of Spode, Royal Doulton and the Empire Porcelain Company soon providing dinner services for colonial compounds from Canada to Australia. The booming pot banks of Stoke-on-Trent supplied the ceramics of Empire right up to the 1960s, while Herbert Minton’s eponymous tiles could be found beautifying the most far-flung of colonial projects – perhaps most wonderfully, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s convocation hall (Cowasji Jehangir) at the University of Bombay. This is not Stoke-on-Trent’s only connection with Bombay, as it was in Burslem that the sculptor John Lockwood Kipling learned his craft and decided to name his son ‘Rudyard’ after a local beauty spot just north of the Six Towns. Rudyard Kipling, the finest poet of Empire, would describe his birthplace of Bombay as the ‘Mother of cities to me’, but his name is a reminder of his link to an altogether different colonial place.

In the postwar decades, the impact of Empire returned to Stoke-on-Trent in the form of extensive migration from Pakistan and India (most notably, the Mirpur district of disputed Kashmir), but the lucrative business of imperial production collapsed. The protected markets of the Commonwealth were thrown open to global competition. As with the cotton mills of Manchester and the port of Liverpool, the relative decline of the pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent is connected to the end of Empire. Only a generation ago, the social and economic foundations of Stoke-on-Trent – as of so many parts of the UK – were bound up with a colonial identity which has now simply disappeared.

Indeed, barely a generation ago, that connection to Empire was central to the history and identity of my own family. My father was born in 1941 at a quintessential site of Kipling’s Raj – the cool climes of Ootacamund, an Indian hill station in the Nilgiris Hills of Tamil Nadu. So-called ‘Snooty Ooty’ (now, Udhagamandalam), with its bungalows, club, Gothic Revival Anglican church, and beagles’ pack, was where the officers and wives of the Indian Civil Service retreated from the blistering heat of the plains. One such officer was Roland Hunt CMG, my grandfather, despatched to Madras with his wife Pauline as a sub-collector after a year of Empire Studies – which involved a spot of Tamil and then learning to ride round the Oxford Parks – to administer British colonialism for what he and his colleagues regarded as the foreseeable future. In fact, his string of diplomatic postings perfectly mirrored the death-throes of the British Empire. When Indian independence arrived, he progressed to the High Commissions of Pakistan, South Africa and Malaya – where he assisted in the transition to Malaysia and (family legend has it) rewrote Benjamin Britten’s score for the new national anthem, side by side on the piano stool, with the founding prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman. His final appointments followed the expansion of the Commonwealth, with the former colonies of Uganda and Trinidad and Tobago concluding his career as high commissioner. In retirement, the colonial legacy lingered. Visiting Roland and Pauline’s bungalow in Pangbourne, Berkshire, was to enter a visual dreamscape of Empire: prints of Madras’s Fort St George and Calcutta’s Fort William; editions of Kipling and Conrad; the traditional colonial ephemera of drums, rugs, diplomatic photographs and oriental artefacts. But to me, as a young boy, it appeared a civilization as ancient and distant, in its way, as the Aztecs, the Egyptians or the classical Greeks.

*   *   *

None of this means that Empire as a global force has ended. If the formal dominion of the old European empires has indeed faded, competing nations have emerged to fill the vacuum. In the twenty-first century, it is China and India who are on the rise, dictating a broader pivot in world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific – both of them exerting geopolitical ambition and challenging the remnants of Anglo-American hegemony. One of the undercurrents in this book is the playing out of this uneasy transition, from a decaying colonial legacy to the assertive impact of emerging nations in former cities of Empire. For the myriad ways in which cities restore or erase, condemn or commemorate their colonial pasts is itself another stage in the compelling and continuing history of Empire.

1

Boston

‘A City upon a Hill’

As evening fell on 16 December 1773, with thousands pressed into the square pew boxes and overflowing balconies of the whitewashed Old South Meeting House, brewer and politician Samuel Adams stepped forward to announce that ‘he could think of nothing further to be done – that they had now done all they could for the Salvation of the Country’. The wealthy Boston merchant John Hancock agreed, erupting in frustration: ‘Let every man do what is right in his own eyes!’ Fifteen minutes later, the war whoops began.

It was the signal the ‘patriots’ had been waiting for. Secreted across Boston – in living rooms and parlours, workshops and shipyards – men had covered their faces, donned disguises and readied their weapons. Men like James Brewer, a pump- and blockmaker, whose wife had blackened his face with burnt cork; the blacksmith’s apprentice Joshua Wyeth; the carpenter Amos Lincoln; the boat builder Samuel Nowell; and the lemon importer Edward Proctor. Anxious about what the ensuing hours might bring, these ‘Sons of Liberty’ steeled themselves for a potentially deadly clash with British troops.

Dressed as Mohawk Indians, they gathered together a hundred strong outside the Meeting House, then surged south-east through the narrow Boston lanes, shouting like Indians and whistling like boatswains, along Milk Street and Hutchinsons Street, and down to the docks, where the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver sat at anchor alongside Griffin’s Wharf. The crowds followed in a torchlit procession, before coming to a stop at the waterfront, silent as they watched the ‘Mohawks’ board the ships, brush past the crews and uncover their cargo.

The night’s quiet was shattered by the sound of axes heaving into wooden crates, the fixing of tackle and hauling of chests – and then the splash of tons of tea leaves cascading into the waters of Boston harbour. For hour after hour – within sight of the 64th Regiment stationed at Fort William, and in easy range of the guns of Admiral John Montagu’s flagship, HMS Captain – the Mohawk stevedores unloaded the valuable cases of black and green Bohea, Singlo, Hyson and Congou tea. ‘We were merry in an under tone,’ Joshua Wyeth recalled, ‘at the idea of making so large a cup of tea for the fishes.’ Over 340 chests, containing over 46 tons of tea priced at almost £10,000, were dumped into Boston harbour.

As they fell, the splintered crates and sodden tea leaves formed an eighteenth-century oil-slick rising and falling with the Boston tides, lapping the Dorchester coastline all the way down to the British soldiers stationed at Fort William. The Atlantic currents never took the tea leaves back to Britain, but they had no need to. News of the 1773 ‘Boston Tea-Party’ soon reached London – and Westminster’s response to this audacious assault on British property would set in train the events of the American Revolution.¹

Today, over 230 years later, Boston, Massachusetts is still defined by that revolutionary moment. It is the city of the ‘Freedom Trail’ where, beginning at Boston Common under the golden dome of the State House and snaking all the way up to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, you can walk the story of liberation, pursued by historical re-enactors. And be it Paul Revere House, Old North Church or USS Constitution – ‘Old Ironsides’ – the urban narrative is powerfully consistent: here was a city which stoically laboured under the heel of British colonialism until the greed and arrogance of the occupiers finally forced the citizens to turn freedom-fighters.

The reupholstered Faneuil Hall is branded ‘Cradle to Liberty’; the Boston Historical Society exhibition at the Old State House is a Whiggish tale entitled ‘From Colony to Commonwealth’. At the Museum of Fine Arts, that heritage of freedom is reaffirmed with its magnificent collection of John Singleton Copley portraits, depicting the likes of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock in suitably heroic poses. Adams, caught in the aftermath of the 1770 ‘Boston Massacre’ (the fatal shooting of five Bostonians by British soldiers),* is especially striking, as he points melodramatically to the 1691 Massachusetts charter, every inch the wronged constitutionalist.

Implicit within the history is a residual anti-British sentiment which has become an important facet of modern Boston’s identity. Mass Irish immigration to Massachusetts in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenth-century Great Famine helped to cement an implicit antagonism towards the redcoats and lobsterbacks across the pond. It certainly did no harm for city politicians to play to anti-British populism, and few managed it more successfully than the Kennedy clan. Even as US ambassador to Great Britain, stationed in London in the run-up to the Second World War, Joseph P. Kennedy, the grandson of Irish emigrants, could barely suppress his distaste for the UK. Much of that prejudice cascaded down the generations, and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy’s support for Sinn Fein always worked well with his Irish-Catholic Boston base. In less salubrious parts of South Boston there were often nickels and dimes to be found in pub collection tins for NORAID and ‘the cause’.

But turn east from the Old South Meeting House, under the dreary skyscrapers of modern ‘Washington Street’ towards the Old State House and a different Boston peeks out of the past. There, either side of the eighteenth-century balcony from which the Declaration of Independence was read in July 1776, stands a glistening, golden lion and a rearing, silver unicorn. The coat of arms of the British royal family was ripped down in the aftermath of Independence but replaced in 1882, and it is that crest which highlights the hidden history of imperial Boston. For this city, right up to the moment of revolution, was renowned as one of the most ardently British and comfortably colonial of imperial satellites. Its birth and growth signalled the coming of the British urban footprint across the globe, whilst its unexpected rebellion in 1773 marked the first great rupture in the imperial story. There is no stop along the Freedom Trail for the less straightforward elements of this history of colonialism: before it became the revolutionary citadel of 1773, Boston was a fiercely royal city, a true Protestant redoubt. You would not know it from the John Hancock Tower, Franklin Street or Congress Street, but in the bones of Boston can be found some of the earliest traces of a British imperial identity.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

Modern Boston’s origins do not begin with its namesake in Lincolnshire, but rather in the Stour valley, that Arcadian stretch of ‘Constable country’ running through Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Essex. In the early 1600s, this was a place of piety and godliness, of strict worship and careful magistracy, where drink and ‘rough sports’ were banned and preaching and prayer encouraged. Among the governing East Anglian merchant, legal and landowning classes, the call to Reformation had been answered most purposefully. They would come to be known as the Puritans – Protestants who focused on the pure word of Christian faith drawn from the pages of scripture, considered themselves in a much more personal relationship with God and eschewed what they regarded as the rituals, hierarchies and idolatry of the Church of England. Their mission was to lead England out of the lingering, crypto-Catholic darkness which had corrupted the Anglican church since the Reformation of 1534. Among the islands of godliness lining the Stour valley was, for example, Colchester in Essex – described by one admirer in the late 1590s as a ‘town [which], for the earnest profession of the gospel, [was] like unto the city upon a hill; and as a candle upon a candlestick’.²

This was the stern spiritual environment in which the future governor of Massachusetts John Winthrop was brought up. His father, Adam Winthrop, had been a small-holder, lawyer and squire of Groton Manor, Suffolk – as well as a committed supporter of the Puritan cause. His son proved equally strict in his piety, as a barrister at Gray’s Inn, and then a middling landowner and magistrate. Yet all around him, from the 1610s, Winthrop spied evidence of God’s displeasure at work. The dual curse of erastianism (state interference in ecclesiastical matters) and Arminianism (which rejected strict Protestant doctrines of predestination) was undermining the true church, whilst the authorities appeared ever more indulgent to the unChristian pastimes of the ‘rude sort’. On the European Continent, a great struggle between true religion and popery, the forces of light and dark, had opened in 1618 with the start of the Thirty Years’ War, but Britain, under King James I and VI, was reluctant to intervene. The godly saw ahead of them a fearful Counter-Reformation, coordinated by the Catholic Spanish empire, threatening the very survival of Protestant England, and yet few in the Stuart court seemed to appreciate the eschatological immediacy.

By 1628, in his pamphlet Reasons for the Plantation in New England, Winthrop was dismissing England as ‘this sinful land’ which was growing ‘weary of her inhabitants, so as man which is the most precious of all Creatures, is here more vile and base, than the earthe they tread upon’.³ With his family’s personal salvation at risk, Winthrop started to contemplate an Exodus. He need not have chosen America. Plantations had already emerged by the late 1500s as far afield as Ulster and Bermuda, with the dual ambition of profit and Protestantism. Land was carved out from the wilderness or expropriated from indigenous residents, handed over to enterprising colonial settlers, who then ‘planted’ labourers on to the fields and farmed it for profit. It was an early form of colonialism usefully combining systems of patronage with the informal extension of state power. Winthrop himself had numerous family ties to Ireland and, in the early 1620s, was considering emigrating to his brother-in-law’s plantation at Montrath, in County Laois, in the middle of Ireland. At the time, the main possibility across the Atlantic was Jamestown, Virginia, settled in 1607 (christened in honour of

Reviews for Cities of Empire

[laffrey_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Cities of Empire, Tristram Hunt seeks to tell the story of the British Empire through ten of the ex-jewels in the crown. Hunt provides a thorough overview of the development of each city - both economically and architecturally, tracing a path from one city to the next. The most interesting entry, however, is the last, Liverpool. Hunt uses Liverpool to underline the growth, decline and future of the empire as a whole.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting but left me wanting much more.Tristram Hunt takes 10 cities that were part of the British Empire roughly in the period that they flared to a certain prominence and details their decline and in some instances resurgence. It's quite a small snapshot and didn't really feel to me that I got the essence of the different cities. A good starting point before exploring his sources. His 30 or so pages per city shows the changes the Empire made to the city before moving on and I was somewhat dissatisfied with the chapter on Dublin, the only city I'm relatively familiar with.Worth reading for an overview and jumping-off points to explore further if you're interested.

[vpfluke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of the transformative effect on the world of British colonialism. Besides the regular politicl histories, Hunt tries to show how vast regions were changed into something more than an extension of Englnd, something much more than an evolution of the conquered peoples of the various overseas cities Hunt has chosen to write about. Boston became a "revolutionary citadel. Bridgetown (British West Indies) symbolizes the complex of slavery,. Dublin was an ironic symbol of British sovereignty. Cape Town showed Britain's ascendancy in the colonies over other European powers. Calcutta, Bombay, nd New Delhia show how various forces shape dn intertwine wih Indian culture. Hong Kong is the financial oasis in eastern Asia. Melbourne is a later city in the Brtish empire that could be really British. Liverpool is the English city whose importance was deependent on trade and shipping to the colonies, not a traditional English smaller city outside of London, such as Bristol or Leicester. A wide-raning study.

[wdwilson3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Through histories of ten cities of the British Empire (Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi and Liverpool) author Tristram Hunt lays out some fascinating details of the British colonial period. These cities were pivotal locales for major historical struggles – the American Revolution, the slave trade, and the opium wars to name just a few. Hunt details these events in the context of colonial urban development in a manner that expanded my knowledge significantly. This is a good, well-researched, well-documented history of surprising scope.

[mattries37315 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The legacy of the economic and political practices of the growth of the British Empire and the implemented of those practices in colonial cities are at the root of Tristram Hunt’s “Cites of Empire”. Instead of looking at the British Empire as either a good or bad “thing”, Hunt examines how it grew and the impact it has on our world today while not forgetting the motivations of those who implemented the policies in the first place.Hunt examines 10 cities connected to the spread of Britain’s empire around the world, giving each city its own exclusive chapter. While each city is given its own history, Hunt shows how the British experiences in one city affected their decisions in others he was writing about. The history of a particular city is not the only thing covered with the individuals who impacted it; Hunt gives the reader a wonderful portrait of the cultural, social, and architectural developments along with those who promoted them.While Hunt’s descriptive writing of the architectural are wonderful, the text would have been enhanced with illustrations of some kind of the building he was describing (thought as I was reading an advanced reader’s edition of the book there might be some in for sale edition). The maps at the opening of each chapter helped to place the buildings and other geographical issues into context if one got confused for any reason. Although Hunt’s insights into the society of the cities he writes about, at times the information he writes feels like a redux of previous cities’ and so slowed my reading as thought back on previous chapters.Upon finishing “Cities of Empire” I had a better sense of the imperial history of British colonization, a topic in history that I have personally wanting to know more about. Although not perfect, Tristram Hunt’s book gives the reader a history of the British Empire and its legacy in the 21st Century without judging or defending as good or evil. I whole recommend this book to those interested in the spread of British culture around the world.

[isolablue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Author Tristram Hunt took on an extremely large project when he undertook the writing of CITIES OF EMPIRE. One might wonder how anyone could write the history of some of the former British Empire's largest cities in a tome of less than 1,000 pages. Hunt makes it work in less than 500 by concentrating on specific times, events, or curiosity in each of the ten cities he chose to profile.We all know how large the British Empire was before it crumbled, but not everyone may know the individual stories of the cities highlighted in Hunt's well-written and arranged book. His choice of cities is interesting in itself. Dublin? "Ireland may be regarded as the earliest English colony," according to Friedrich Engels. And the last city profiled? Liverpool? That may raise an eyebrow or two, but who stops to take into consideration the affect the rise and fall of the British Empire had on one of its own key cities at home.Rather than write the entire history of how the British came to be in each of the highlighted cities, outlining all they built and accomplished there, and then chronicling the bitter end of every individual one, author Hunt chose to feature something specific in regards to the various developing areas. In the section on Boston, most of the action focuses on the famous Boston Tea Party, the slightly prankster-ish yet very serious rebellious act performed by the colonists in Boston as they said "no" to "taxation without representation." Visiting Bridgetown, Barbados, the book shows the sugar trade and the slave trade, side by side.Each city is presented differently as their histories depend on the time period in which the British arrived, the reason for their being there, and most of all - on commerce, trade, and money. The section on Hong Kong is fascinating and puts the opium trade under the microscope. We may all think we know how the British ended up ruling Hong Kong for so long, but Hunt's thoughtful and well-researched writing on that topic puts it all into perspective.Most of the time the reader is alternately fascinated and repulsed by the British. This may manifest itself the best in a section on Dublin where the author writes about a period of time in history when the Irish were anxious to rid themselves of as much of their British past as possible. Most of this took place after independence in 1922 when much of Dublin's historic Georgian architecture was torn down. The reader is left feeling horrified by the lack of a historic preservationist ideal but also feeling a bit amused at the Irishmen's glee at getting rid of all reminders of a "repressive past." In the end, it is all history. Important history. World history. The world wouldn't be the same without the British Empire having thrived and died. In each of the cities studied by Hunt (which also include Bombay, Calcutta, Cape Town, and others) we see the strange, unknown future as well as the tiny, flitting ghosts of the past. It is up to each individual reader to determine whether any of these cities is better off or worse for having been part of that weird and glorified world of the British Empire.