The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21)

by Joel Kotkin

  Amsterdam was barely more than a fishing village in the thirteenth century, until its residents began methodically to expand their trading capabilities by extending their canal system. As the city grew, it slowly strengthened its security perimeter, guarded against fire by mandating brick construction, and took measures to improve sanitation.16

  Other Dutch commercial centers such as Leiden and Rotterdam also took steps to improve their ability to trade with the world. With their vast fleet of 1,800 seagoing vessels, the entrepreneurs of the great Dutch cities soon seemed to be poking their noses everywhere. In the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, and the newly discovered Americas, they usually bested their rivals at the critical game of buying low and selling high.

  With half its people located in towns and cities by the early seventeenth century, the Netherlands had become the most urbanized society in Europe. 17 Amsterdam, Holland’s primary city, was something new and yet remarkably familiar: a dense modern city noteworthy not so much for its heroic statues and great boulevards, churches, or palaces as for its teeming alleys, bustling wharves, and clean and comfortable residences. Having won at great cost their independence, the Amsterdammers did not seek out military adventures to become a new Rome. They simply wanted to carry out their trade with minimum interference. 18

  The Amsterdammers’ Calvinist faith also helped bolster a civic culture centered around trade and commerce. Calvinist pastors expunged the old Catholic laws against usury and cast away the age-old prejudices against capitalist enterprise. Indeed, the Hollanders saw their material success as further proof of God’s sanction. “Amsterdam,” noted a popular seventeenth-century Dutch history, “has risen through the hand of God to the peak of prosperity and greatness.”19

  Like ancient Alexandria, Cairo at its height, and Venice in the fifteenth century, Amsterdam owed much of its commercial success to the presence of a vast diversity of people. The city boasted fully functioning Catholic, Huguenot, Jewish, Lutheran, and Mennonite religious institutions as well as the dominant Dutch Reformed Church; those outside the officially sanctioned religious consensus comprised roughly one in four city residents. “The miracle of toleration was to be found,” observed the French historian Fernand Braudel, “wherever the community of trade convened.” 20

  The combination of commercial vitality and a diverse population created a climate ideal for bold new innovations in art, technology, and philosophy. In contrast, in Spain, complained Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor-general, “one cannot possess any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism.”21 The Dutch cities not only permitted open inquiry and innovation, but nurtured them in their universities, scientific societies, and publishing concerns.

  This progressive spirit proved critical to the cities’ success. Initially, Dutch trade was heavily dependent on commodities such as wine, timber, sugar, and chemicals. By the seventeenth century, however, the Dutch applied innovative techniques to move more decisively into the “rich trades”—dyes, glazes, ceramics, linen, fine furniture, and tapestries. Dutch entrepreneurs also exported engineering services, industrial expertise, and technology to a vast array of countries throughout Europe and even as far away as Mexico.22

  Holland’s expanding middle class proved critical to its development as a major cultural center. Dutch artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were frequently the sons of skilled craftspeople—designers of tapestries, fur cutters, goldsmiths, and the like. These artists received support largely from the local merchant and manufacturing elites. Art became a way to achieve not only fame but also money. Rembrandt, as a fashionable portrait painter, made far more than a university professor.23

  LONDON

  The democratization of culture was evident in other European cities. Technological improvements had made books increasingly accessible to the masses; by the 1530s, in France a copy of the New Testament became affordable even to a laborer. Old barriers were breaking down; Jews, such as Spinoza, and women now were able to engage in intellectual and cultural dialogue. The French author Louise Labé exhorted women: “The honor that knowledge will give us will be entirely ours, and it will not be taken from us by the thief ’s skill . . . or by the passage of time.”24

  Nowhere was this new spirit more evident than in London. During the Elizabethan period in the late sixteenth century, London evolved into a brilliant showcase for everything from drama to intense scientific and theological debate. Long forbidden or frightening, knowledge was now regarded as a supreme value.25

  Soon London began surpassing Amsterdam in both intellectual achievement and commercial vigor. By the late seventeenth century, the Dutch were clearly losing their once inimitable boldness and tenacity. Dutch capitalists—like those in Venice before them—now often opted to become rentiers, investors in land and stock, rather than initiate new ventures.

  Interested primarily in short-term financial gain—epitomized by the famous tulip mania of 1636–1637—the Dutch elites lacked the moral resolve to defend some of their key overseas holdings, most portentously their fledgling colony of New Netherland. One early explorer rightly identified the colony’s settlement at New Amsterdam as “a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world.” Surrounded by rivers and bays that opened to the sea, the tiny colony of barely one thousand souls represented an almost unparalleled opportunity for the expansion of Dutch enterprise.

  But faced with the need to ward off intrusions from the surrounding English colonies, Dutch business interests balked at spending the funds needed to defend the tiny colony. What mattered more to them was to keep hold of Suriname, isolated, easy to defend, and also rich in “commodities” like sugar. In 1664, with barely a fight, they surrendered New Netherland to the British, who quickly renamed the capital city New York.26

  THE WORLD CAPITALIST CAPITAL

  Barely a decade after New Amsterdam became New York, London was ready to assume the role as the world capitalist capital.27 This shift may have proven inevitable in the long run. Like the Italian city-states before them, the Dutch cities were constrained by a lack of resources and people. In contrast, London could draw on Britain’s far larger population for settlers, soldiers, and sailors. Britain also possessed critical raw materials such as coal, iron, and tin. Even under the most enlightened administration, these factors likely would have forced the Dutch cities to accept secondary position behind London.28

  London’s emergence rested on its ability to marry the advantages of a great capital city with the commercial abilities of the Dutch trading centers or Italian city-states. From the fourteenth century on, London had attracted an ever greater portion of the country’s young and ambitious of all classes. Even as older centers such as Winchester and Lincoln declined, London’s population and economy expanded rapidly.

  As in the Netherlands, the triumph of Protestantism accelerated London’s commercial growth. Henry VIII’s sale of church lands, roughly one-sixth of the kingdom, enriched both the state and the property-owning classes, including merchants and artisans. Upstarts rising from middle and working classes—some aspiring to join the aristocracy—constituted an essential component of what the historian F.R.H. Du Boulay would dub “an age of ambition.”29

  Geography had made the British seafaring people. Now the irrepressible desire to “better” their station propelled individual Britons toward long-distance trade.30 Britain’s successful imperial thrust ultimately gave it control of possessions from the coast of China to the wilds of North America. Arguably the most critical was the gradual takeover of India and its vast trade. In 1601, Britain’s revenues were less than a tenth of Mogul India’s; within two hundred years, the relationship was totally reversed in England’s favor.31

  This venturesome spirit reflected a great surge in national ambition and purpose. “Unbounded Thames,” Alexander Pope predicted in 1712, “shall flow for all mankind.”32 In the sixteenth century, London itself grew from 60,000 to nearly 225,000 souls. Rebuilt on a grand scale after
the great fire of 1666, it would soon grow into Europe’s largest city.33 By 1790, London’s population had swelled to almost 900,000 people, more than four times that of Amsterdam. 34

  Seeing a vast new realm of opportunities, Italian, Dutch, and German merchants and bankers increasingly gravitated to the British capital. 35 Of the seventeen leading London-based merchant banks to survive into the twentieth century, fifteen could trace their origins to various immigrants, many to this early period. The city also benefited from the migration of entrepreneurs and skilled laborers seeking religious freedom from such places as Flanders, Germany, and France.36

  London’s rise was not only greater in degree, but also markedly different in character from that of imperial rivals such as Paris, Madrid, Vienna, or St. Petersburg. Like London, these great capitals boasted grand cathedrals, palaces, and parks, expressions of their national greatness. But only London created the vital economic institutions essential to the control and administration of an ever expanding world economy. It also acquired that critical sense of moral purpose underpinning great cities since the earliest times. Like imperial Rome at its height, London prepared to both lead the world and improve it.37

  PART FIVE

  THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE ANGLO -AMERICAN URBAN REVOLUTION

  London’s commercial and imperial ascendancy laid the foundation for the next critical shift in the evolution of cities, one driven by a revolution in manufacturing technology. Although industry had been an important component in urban life from Mesopotamian times, in the late eighteenth century Britain would pioneer the creation of a new kind of city, one tied primarily to the mass production of goods.

  Many natural factors favored Britain’s early industrial emergence, such as closeness to the Atlantic, the convenient rivers for power and transport, and later on ample coal resources. More important still, Britain enjoyed a social and political climate ideal for the growth of manufacturing endeavors. Unified for much of its history, it suffered neither the pervasive fragmentation of power that bedeviled Italy nor France’s tumultuous upheavals. Britain’s shift to a new economic paradigm also benefited from the elimination of both the Catholic hierarchy and its vast estates, which broke the “stratified Christian co-operative” of the Middle Ages.1

  This created an ideal climate for early innovators rising up from the old artisan class, men such as Richard Arkwright, who developed the “spinning jenny” in 1768. Aristocracy remained powerful in Britain, but men of property, no matter what their ancestry, enjoyed a wider latitude to build enterprises than in most other European countries, much less than in the more constricted East.

  Finally, Britain’s advent as the world’s dominant empire unlocked both vast sources of raw materials and new markets outside Europe. “The dawn of the era of capitalist production,” in Karl Marx’s phrase, coincided with the consolidation of empire. Capital from imperial ventures— cotton, tobacco, slaves—provided much of the financing needed for the island’s headlong leap forward into the industrial frontier.2

  LANCASHIRE: ORIGINATOR OF THE REVOLUTION

  With its specialized institutions employing tens of thousands of clerks, administering the world’s trade in equities as well as commodities such as coal and wool, London clearly occupied the commanding heights of the British economy.3 But the most radical transformation—and the greatest source of Britain’s wealth—took place in cities far from the great metropolis.

  The epicenter for this new urban revolution lay in Lancashire. Long among Britain’s poorest regions,4 in the early nineteenth century Lancashire emerged as the world’s most dynamic economic area. The population of its principal city, Manchester, soared from 94,000 to more than 270,000 during the first thirty years of the century and would more than double again by its end.

  Some smaller cities experienced even more rapid growth. In 1810, the worsted manufacturing center of Bradford was an obscure small town with 16,000 people. As the capacity of the city’s factories rose by more than 600 percent in the first half of the nineteenth century, the population exploded to more than 103,000, the fastest growth experienced by any city in contemporary Europe.5

  Unlike London, which remained both a traditional commercial center and an imperial capital, these cities represented something entirely new: urban centers whose prominence rested primarily on the mass production of manufactured goods. This evolution would mark the beginning of an urban revolution that would transform cities all around the world.

  The rapid growth of these industrial cities greatly accelerated Britain’s unprecedented rate of urbanization. Between 1750 and 1800, England, although it accounted for barely 8 percent of Europe’s population, was responsible for roughly 70 percent of all urban growth. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain became the first country with a majority of its people living in large cities; by 1881, urbanites accounted for two-thirds of its population.6

  “WITH COGS TYRANNIC”

  The Industrial Revolution profoundly transformed the urban environment in often hideous ways. Visitors remarked about the persistent smell of the tanneries, breweries, dyeworks, and gasworks. Living conditions, particularly for the poor, were often abominable.7 Friedrich Engels wrote this account of a working-class ward in Manchester:

  Everywhere one sees heaps of refuse, garbage and filth. . . . One walks along a very rough path on the river bank, in between clothes-posts and washing lines to reach a chaotic group of little, one storied, one room cabins. Most of them have earth floors and working, living and sleeping all take place in one room.8

  This squalor created lethal health problems. Death rates in early-nineteenth-century Manchester were one in twenty-five, almost three times that of surrounding rural hamlets. Death from disease, malnutrition, and overwork became so pervasive that factories could be kept running only by tapping a continuous supply of workers from the distant countryside and from impoverished Ireland. 9 Extreme poverty in what was now easily the world’s greatest economic power, noted Alexis de Tocqueville, appeared more pervasive than in such backwaters as Spain or Portugal.10

  The treatment of young children was particularly shocking. Traditionally, children had labored alongside their parents at home, in a small workshop, or in the fields; now they often worked by themselves, servicing machines in vast impersonal industrial plants. One West Indian slave-holder, on a visit to Bradford, thought it impossible for “any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine to work twelve and a half hours a day.”

  In part, this “cruel” treatment may have resulted from lack of intimate contact between owners and workers. The capitalist controlling a small factory might have had some casual familiarity with his workers and their children. The great capitalists owning the largest factories, in contrast, often lived far away, in London or at their country estates.11

  In contrast to the creators of the classical or Renaissance cities, such beneficiaries of the new order initially scorned the cities of their creation. These were places to make money, not to spend one’s leisure time. “There are no pleasant rides, no pleasant walks,” a socially prominent Bradford doctor complained, “all being bustle, hurry and confusion.” 12

  This new industrial society may have been creating unprecedented wealth, but at the cost of every basic human value. There seemed little place for either compassion or God in the factory; the industrial city seemed largely devoid of sacred space or any compelling social morality other than what Marx called “the cash nexus.” By the 1850s, religious attendance, once almost universal, had dropped to less than 50 percent and to less than a third in such cities as Manchester.13 William Blake expressed his alarm at the impact of this mechanistic age:

  Washed by the Water wheels of Newton, black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden.14

  “HERO OF THE AGE”

  By the 1850
s, signs of the new order were evident everywhere in British cities: looming railway bridges, vast tunnel systems, sprawling factories. Gradually, some began to sense something monumental was afoot. There was in Britain, noted the usually even-tempered Tocqueville, at “every step . . . something to make the tourist’s heart leap.”15

  Where Blake saw only the soulless “cogs tyrannic,” some now envisioned the factory as the harbinger of a glorious and prosperous future. Sir George Head, traveling in Leeds in 1835, described a mechanized cloth factory as “a temple dedicated by man, grateful for the stupendous power that moved within, to Him who built the universe.” The “hero of the age,” he noted, was not the knight or aristocrat, but the “hard-working mechanic, blackened by smoke, yet radiant in the light of intelligence.” 16

  By midcentury, this sense of optimism had spread as even ordinary Britons now began to enjoy the benefits of mechanization. Wages, spurred by the growth of trade unions, now rose. Working-class consumers, who before could hardly have hoped to afford them, could now purchase such items as stockings or dining utensils. Some, particularly in the skilled trades, ascended into the middle class; children from the industrialist class now entered the elite universities. Having become great lords without proper titles, some now, by marriage or through influence, acquired noble status.17

  Social reform movements—led usually by the clergy and a rising professional class—now organized to address the most obvious defects of the industrial system. Reform legislation, such as the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835 and the first Public Health Act by Parliament in 1848, brought more efficient administration to the sprawling, chaotic cities. Reformers established parks, baths, and washhouses for the poor. New sanitary measures and improvements in medicine lowered urban rates of mortality significantly. Crime, once rampant, dropped dramatically.18