Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  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 aut
horities 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 Queen Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’), and, after its conversion to a royal colony in 1624, a model of loyal Anglicanism. Alternatively, there was the struggling colony of Plymouth, founded in 1620 by the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, who had fled religious persecution in England first to the Netherlands and then to America, determined to separate themselves from the corrupt, decaying Old World. These struggling outposts formed part of a broader, incremental ‘New England’ society of European colonists encompassing Cape Ann, Rhode Island, parts of Connecticut and New Haven.