ALISON BASHFORD
Tristram Hunt
TEN CITIES THAT MADE AN EMPIRE
514pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 1 84614 325 0
In the late 1990s, there was a curious attempt to identify cities that warranted global status, and then rank their economic and cultural significance on a scale from alpha to gamma. Two only – New York and London – came in at a steroidal "Alpha++". Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Dubai, Sydney achieved a respectable Alpha+, while Leipzig, Portland, Algiers were awarded an unfortunate Gamma minus. Tristram Hunt has written a history of the assertively alpha cities of the British Empire: Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, Liverpool. All these towns have been hitched to the fortunes of a British-led commercial system over the past 300 years. Hunt's is not a twenty-first-century alpha list, however – a fact that betrays what this book is really about: the rise and decline of the British Empire; and at least as much the latter as the former, as the cameo appearances of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire indicate.
Such a book could easily become sentimental about the British Empire, and something about the title and the jacket design plays to that. But Ten Cities that Made an Empire is decisively not what Hunt calls antiquarian, not a "sepia version of the colonial past". While he never quite confesses to having written a history of the British Empire, I suspect he wanted to write just that all along. The cities are at least as much a device as Hunt's real objects of inquiry. The result is British imperial history with a new angle, but no new thesis. Instead, the book serves as a compelling introduction to imperial history, especially for those unfamiliar with the shift from the so-called First Empire to the Second; from the Atlantic world that shattered with the American War of Independence, to the East – India, East Asia and the Pacific. Hunt leads us through the world-shaping events of the classic imperial story: the thirteen colonies and their rebellion; the slave trade and the sugar trade that made so many fortunes on the back of so much agony and agonizing; the East India Company, that commercial monster that single-mindedly dealt with Mughal rulers and then played all the wrong cards; the wars with the French, the Americans, the Dutch, the Chinese; and all along the goods and commercial mission that linked and drove the whole.
And the buildings. It is a treat when Hunt turns to architecture and design. We accompany him on walking tours, taking in marble, stone and brick signifiers of empire, trade and colonialism, above and below ground. Sometimes we see the cities as their designers intended them, however naively, and as colonizing and colonized subjects lived and died in them. Hunt brings us up to the present, gesturing to the architectural remnants that tell the stories of anti-colonialism and decolonization.
His chapter on Georgian Dublin is especially strong in this respect, the raising and then the demolition of a quarter of the city that symbolized British rule. In the penultimate chapter, he explores extravagant New Delhi, the Indian capital designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker and completed by 1930, just when the Raj was coming undone. This time and place reveal a different architectural response to decolonization altogether; not demolition but an equally powerful takeover and move-in. Lutyens's palatial Viceroy's House simply became the President's house after 1947. One of the forty-five colour plates shows Gandhi and Mountbatten taking tea at the Viceroy's House on the eve of independence, a building that was soon to turn into Rashtrapati Bhavan. Gandhi certainly looks more relaxed than Mountbatten more at home, we might say.
Ten Cities is structured by place, but also by time. With a sure hand, Hunt moves us through centuries of both politics and design. Some of his cities are located in history in obvious ways. Boston represents the First Empire and the eighteenth-century crisis that turned the thirteen colonies into the United States. Likewise, Cape Town affords Hunt the perfect opportunity to explore the early nineteenth-century swing to the East, via the South (Cape Town taken from the Dutch in 1795 and Cape Colony formed in 1814). Melbourne is the opulent Victorian city built on gold.
Other cities – far older – belong less obviously to particular historical periods, and Hunt has had to make careful decisions about their chronological usefulness to the whole. With considerable skill he pins successive chapters to a representative period and place, while at the same time drawing on each town's longer history. Calcutta, for example, is the city through which Hunt tells the eighteenth-century imperial story of the Mughals, the East India Company's ascendancy, and the suite of governors-general who finally hobbled the Company while asserting British power in different form. And all this with an eye to its neoclassical building programme. Then Hunt sweeps us to Hong Kong in a move that shows the shift in economic orthodoxy from the Company's eighteenth-century monopoly on trade, to the East Asian city built on nineteenth-century free trade: the city that never looked back. Next we move forward in time to Bombay, selected to illustrate mid-Victorian imperial interventions expressed in sanitary engineering as much as military, administrative, or fiscal rule. There, the Indian military itself was to be sanitized by the likes of Sir Bartle Frere and the architecturally minded Florence Nightingale. In this way, the central chapters of this book unfold as the classic story of empire, from commerce to industry, from sail to steam, and from the seas to continental railways. Bombay's Victoria Terminus lavishly encased the trains that signalled the future.
It was all about goods and trade. Almost all of Hunt's cities were ports, thrust into historical prominence as places where commodities were warehoused and profits made from transport and exchange. The globalization of earlier centuries is evident here. Oceanic connections between these ports made and destroyed lives and fortunes, and built an empire that came to be defended by British military and naval force. But British traffic was as likely to be damaging as it was to be industrious. The slave trade linked Liverpool and Bridgetown, Barbados. The lucrative opium trade connected port cities across the world's oceans, from Calcutta to Hong Kong. Cotton brought Bombay and Liverpool together, but also brought ruin to local economies.
Although this is a book about ports, it is not written in a maritime tradition. It is a book about cities, but not written in an urban history manner either. Indeed, while Ten Cities that Made an Empire is nominally about urban sites, in the end it is rather more about the historical characters who lived there. The cities become the places where governors lived, for instance, the buildings at least as much containers for engaging personal stories as for developing architectural history.
Hunt clearly likes writing about governors and their circles. He likes the rich British traders too, whose dubious upward mobility and sometimes rapid decline offer anti-imperial morality tales. His other historical actors are locals made good: Rachel Pringle, for example, the Bridgetown freed slave turned brothel and hotel owner; or the Parsi merchant prince Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Curiously, there are next to no indigenous historical actors in Hunt's chapters on Boston and Melbourne. In the latter chapter Hunt laments the city's ignorance of its imperial past, by which he means its connection to Britain. But Hunt doesn't quite perceive that heightened local awareness of indigenous–settler history is the British imperial past. Melbourne's politico-urban history includes spectacular instances of nineteenth-century Aboriginal land claim and civic protest that could easily have enriched the critical and postcolonial credentials of this book. The etiquette of acknowledging indigenous country on which imperial cities are built is now conventional in postcolonial Australia. Indeed, this is what the twenty-first-century vice-regal descendants of all those Regency, Victorian and Edwardian governors-general do now, and as a matter of course.
Thinking through the politics of land might have served Hunt's own argument well, since he claims to overturn a tired and dichotomized good/bad history of the British Empire. This is a thin contribution, however, because such a simplistic rendition of the Empire is mostly long gone. Still, combining academic and popular history is always hard, and while Hunt clearly wants to make a scholarly intervention, the value of this elegant book for the general reader does not, in the end, rest on its historiographical positioning. It has so much else to recommend it.
All Hunt's cities were "alpha plus" in their day, but only Hong Kong has retained, even exceeded, its historical status. It is with good reason that Tristram Hunt begins his book with a reflection on the relationship between Britain and Hong Kong, since the tiny island with the stratospheric financial reach distils the economic story told here: the imperial history of globalization. The political story is altogether different, however, bookended by two anti-colonial riots: one in late eighteenth-century Boston, the other in late twentieth-century Toxteth.
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