Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Along the coastline in Simon’s Bay, the Royal Navy squadron consisted of some thirty to forty ships of the line alongside smaller cruisers and nearly 3,000 sailors housed in Simonstown (where the Royal Navy would remain until 1955). The symbolic significance of this naval base was richly apparent after 1815, when the defeated Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to the island of St Helena until his death in 1821. With naval responsibilities stretching from Cape Verde around Agulhas to Mauritius, the provisioning of St Helena with Constantia wine, meats, fruits and other necessities fell to the sailors of Simonstown. The Royal Navy, which had kept Cape Town from becoming a sword in the hand of France, could enjoy its victory all the more now it was in charge of victualling its chief tormentor.

  After the reinvasion of 1806, successive British administrators became more committed to the long-term prosperity of the Cape. British rule was no longer just a holding operation; it was a determination to develop southern Africa as a component part of the Empire. The debate of the 1790s between the East India Company grandees and Whitehall defence officials as to the viability of the Cape as an imperial possession was forgotten as the British government began to encourage trade in the colony’s natural resources and use the port as a trading hub. Its perfect positioning as ‘the master link of connection between the western and eastern world’ meant the colony was well located for the East India Company flotillas sailing from Calcutta, Madras and Bombay back to Britain. Cape Town also developed a vibrant entrepôt trade in importing timber from Port Jackson, tobacco and cinnamon from Ceylon, Mauritian sugar, Réunion coffee and cloth from Madras. With the Cape now a component part of Empire, the colony’s own wines, wheat and barley, its whale fisheries and merino wool were given easier access to UK markets, with often preferential tariffs. British merchant interest in Cape Town expanded markedly in the early 1800s, and it was not long before a Commercial Exchange, Cape of Good Hope Bank, joint-stock companies and insurance and legal services industry were springing up in the city.67

  In one sense, this was Henry Dundas’s vision of trade and territory, the Royal Navy and mercantilism, at work. Capture of the Cape Colony had given Britain control of the Indian Ocean and, in the process, helped to exclude the French from any sovereign threat to her Indian possessions. Yet, as the nineteenth century advanced, the British administration in the Cape did exactly what Dundas had warned against in 1775, by peopling the colony and establishing permanent settlements.

  Symbolic of Cape Town’s change in tone was the 1814 appointment of Lord Charles Somerset as the new governor. Born in 1767, the second of eight sons of Henry, Duke of Beaufort, Somerset was desperately proud of his Plantagenet bloodline stretching back to King Edward III; his youth at Badminton was spent riding to the Beaufort Hunt. In the early 1800s, he was a prominent member of the Prince Regent’s louche circle in Brighton and London and was frankly horrified by the boondock philistinism he encountered on his arrival at the Cape. The locals were not too enamoured either. ‘If England is determined to use us only as a depot for the dregs of her Aristocracy – if her surplus idlers are to be quartered upon us at this rate – we would … advise our countrymen to avoid these shores,’ was the response Somerset received from the radical journalist John Fairbairn in the pages of the South African Commercial Advertiser.68

  From the outset, Somerset’s ambition was to raise Cape Town to the kind of cultural sophistication evident in its sister imperial cities of Dublin and Bridgetown. He began with the ‘dog-kennel’, as he called it, of Government House, expanding it with new wings and a 23-metre ballroom decorated with blue and gold wallpaper in the Bourbon style, plaster mouldings on the ceiling, lead chandelier roses and cornices. At the summer residence of Newlands, he inserted two original French marble fireplaces. The modest burghers of Dutch, Calvinist Cape Town had never witnessed such splendour.

  Most importantly of all for the future aesthetics of Cape Town, Somerset introduced the veranda into the new Government House. It marked the beginnings of an architectural transformation in the colony as Dutch domestic design started to make way for more flamboyant, Regency styles. Street lamps were attached to corner houses and ornamental ironwork, reminiscent of Merrion Square and St Stephen’s Green, appeared on upper windows. Houses were now built with porticoes and light, latticed verandas with curving zinc roofs. Burchell’s beloved stoep was abandoned for closed porches. Glass windows replaced shuttered windows, plastered ceilings infilled open beams, and thatched roofs were exchanged for tiles. There were now trellised balustrades and a new, naturalistic focus on garden design and the picturesque. Indeed, Lady Anne and Andrew Barnard themselves led the fashion by building ‘The Vineyard’, a simple cottage (sleeping ten) at the bottom of Table Mountain’s eastern buttress, complete with rustic verandas and naturalistic charm.69

  The interior life of Cape Town changed as houses became partitioned up into a series of social settings for the quickening round of visits: drawing rooms, dining rooms and the latest fashion of breakfast rooms. In place of the Spartan simplicity and cool emptiness of the Dutch homes, the British settlers now filled up their houses with chintz curtains, horsehair sofas, English carpets, marbled chimney pieces (following Somerset’s lead), mahogany furniture, flounced dressing tables and Staffordshire ceramics. At Government House, ‘instead of finding a dirty old house with a perpendicular staircase, up which Lord Macartney hopped, gout and all, like a parrot on its perch’, as Lady Anne unkindly put it, there were now elegantly painted and wallpapered state rooms.70

  Somerset’s second significant innovation was in the sporting field, allocating a great deal of effort in building up the South African Turf Club. William Burchell had once visited the Green Point racetrack to the west of Table Bay and rather enjoyed its ragged, multicultural point-to-point feel. ‘Horsemen, without number, fly backwards and forwards to watch the fate of the day; and exhibit their prancing steeds of half Arab or English blood … Nor is it less amusing to watch the motley group on foot: Malays and Negroes mingled with whites, all crowding and elbowing, eager to get a sight of the momentous contest.’71 Somerset clearly felt there was not nearly enough ‘English blood’ in the Cape stables and he began importing thoroughbreds from Badminton.

  His other import was foxhounds. British regimental officers had been hunting buck on the Cape Flats since the mid-1790s, but by the time Somerset turned up steenbuck were finished, and they usually had to make do with jackals. ‘I have been three times a hunting and have had a very capital run each time,’ he wrote to his brother in England after his arrival in 1814. ‘They hunt Fox and two sorts of Deer, whichever they happen to find; the Duyker a large brown deer goes straight away and shows fine sport. The Jackhal is exactly our Fox except that he is larger and has rather a smaller Brush.’ But while his horses were good enough for the chase, Somerset desperately needed a better class of dog. ‘I should be very much oblig’d to you if you would save five couples of unenter’d draft hounds for me when your puppies come in next Christmas, and if you could also send me an old Dog Hound for a stallion Hound.’72

  At work as well as in play, Somerset oversaw the steady Anglicization of Cape culture. In 1812, the Latin School in Cape Town was instructed by Government House ‘to promote and establish the cultivation of the English language to the greatest extent among your pupils of the highest rank, as the foundation upon which they will in their future life best make their way’. Somerset took the policy further by replacing Dutch teachers ‘by Englishmen of a superior class, as affording both the best means of making the English language more general in the Colony and improving the manners and morals of the people’. In official documentation, English took over from Dutch, and British jurisprudence subsumed Dutch law as the colony’s legal system. In matters spiritual, Scottish Calvinist ministers started to assume the ministries at Dutch Reformed churches, and Anglican services became the norm. Increasingly frozen out of law, politics and business, Cape Town’s original Dutch residents became progressively disillusioned
and resentful of British rule – so much so that many allied themselves with the Boer farmers to join the Great Trek northward in the 1830s out of the Cape Colony and into the Transvaal.73

  In addition to the English language, law, religion and domestic style, the Cape’s civic infrastructure was also turning more obviously British with public libraries, museums, Royal Observatory and Mechanics’ Institute all aping the mother country’s civil society. Soon enough there were Union flags billowing in the Table Mountain breeze, amateur dramatic productions of She Stoops to Conquer playing at the African Theatre, the military band thumping out ‘The British Grenadiers’ from the castle parade ground, cricket games between ‘Colonial Born’ and ‘Mother Country’, a comforting Anglican spire at St George’s Cathedral and whist at the Harmony Club. By the mid-nineteenth century the city and its suburbs had become, in the words of its foremost biographers, ‘an identifiably British colonial city’.74 ‘The country, as far as Rondebosch, Wynberg, and Constantia, is really delightful, and more than any other part of the colony, resembles the rich, cultivated scenery of England,’ happily concluded William Burchell.75

  One of Cape Town’s more popular new clubs was the Cape of Good Hope Association for Exploring Central Africa. Formed to finance a trip by the army doctor Andrew Smith into Natal, this committee of well-placed British settlers was perhaps the first sign of Cape Town’s future function. For in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the development of wheat fields and vineyard production, the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold in Witwatersrand and the advent of the railways, the British Empire would become much more interested in what journalist John Fairbairn called the ‘repelling genius’ of the African interior. As it was, in the early 1800s, the importance of Cape Town still lay in its connections to the exterior world. Its vital position as the Gibraltar of the south, as the master connection between east and west, meant control of the Cape allowed sovereignty over India and, with it, the foundations of the Second Empire. Henceforth, no other European power would have the strength to match Britain as a global empire. The creation of naval supremacy, in which Cape Town played so significant a part, meant that the whole world was now Britain’s market. In the words of A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire, In Every Quarter of the World, Including the East Indies (1815), ‘the magnitude and splendour of the resources which have been thus developed cannot fail to fill the mind of every British subject with exultation and gratitude to the Supreme Being for the numerous blessings conferred on this highly favoured nation’.76

  No visitor to the Cape signified this role as the axis of east and west, the lynchpin of nineteenth-century imperialism, more than Richard Wellesley. From Cape Town, Wellesley continued his journey to what stood by the late eighteenth century as the richest and grandest metropolis in the British Empire. In May 1798, the new governor-general set sail for Calcutta.

  5

  Calcutta

  ‘The City of Palaces’

  Nothing could equal the magnificence of my approach to this town. For nearly three miles the river, which is as large as the Thames at London, is bordered by lovely well-built country houses with porticoes and colonnades. The town is a mass of superb palaces in the same style, with the finest fortress in the world – all this is, as in Rome, mixed up with miserable huts and gardens. The green of the lawns surpasses anything you can ever have seen – an extraordinary effect in so hot a country.1

  It did not take long for the one-time classics scholar Richard Wellesley, as the incoming governor-general of India, to add his own Roman imprint to Calcutta. ‘The state rooms were for the first time lighted up,’ recalled the young Lord Valentia of the opening of Wellesley’s Government House in 1803. ‘At the upper end of the largest was placed a very rich Persian carpet, and in the centre of that, a musnud [throne cushion] of crimson and gold, formerly composing part of the ornament of Tipu Sultan’s throne.’ At about ten o’clock, Lord Wellesley, wearing the order of St Patrick, arrived from Fort William, ‘attended by a large body of aide-de-camps, etc., and after receiving, in the northern verandah, the compliments of some of the native princes, and the vakeels [agents] of the others, took his seat. The dancing then commenced, and continued till supper’. After the 800 guests had dined in the marble hall, ‘thence they were summoned about one o’clock to the different verandahs to see the fireworks and illuminations’.

  Ceremony was integral to Wellesley’s idea of Empire. Of course, critics would grumble about the cost, admitted Valentia, ‘but they ought to remember, that India is a country of splendour, of extravagance, and of outward appearance; that the Head of a mighty empire ought to conform himself to the prejudices of the country he rules over’. In short, Wellesley was determined for ‘India to be ruled from a palace, not from a counting-house; with the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail dealer in muslin and indigo’.2

  Such Augustan swagger was to define the ethos of Wellesley’s Calcutta, a colonial citadel which cemented Britain’s ‘Swing to the East’ and, with it, a much more stately and ambitious vision of Empire. The growth of Calcutta was both a symbol and signal of the expanding territorial might of the British Empire in India. And it was embodied in the neo-classical majesty of Wellesley’s Government House and the rituals of oriental extravagance which enveloped it. This was a building designed to affirm an Empire of conquest as well as commerce, and as a conscious affront to the sprawling complex which stood opposite it – the Writers’ Building of the East India Company. Looking like ‘a shabby hospital, or poors-house’, this elongated, Victorian Gothic edifice (built in the 1770s and renovated in the 1880s) originally contained ‘apartments for the writers newly come from Britain’.3 The writers were the teenage apprentices of the East India Company, shipped to Calcutta to run a counting-house Empire which Wellesley thought was corrupt, sordid and ignoble. These ‘cheesemongers of Leadenhall Street’ (the site of the Company’s headquarters in London) ‘are so vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar and stupid’, thought Wellesley, as to be ‘disgusting and intolerable’.4 Theirs was a cut-price approach to power, built on Bengal’s muslin and silk trade, which could only reflect poorly on a Britain called forth to an altogether grander global purpose. That Atlantic empire of trade and commerce, slaves and sugar, even Henry Dundas’s strategy of trading posts and naval forts had now to accede to Britain’s grander Second Empire of sovereignty and dominion; the Writers’ Building was going to make way for the primacy, across Dalhousie Square, of Government House.

  Today, Government House is the Raj Bhavan, the governor’s official residence, and the Writers’ Building is base for the chief secretariat of West Bengal. Where once the pallid young men of the East India Company nursed their ledgers, shirt-sleeved functionaries now wander along the balconies, muttering on mobile phones. The building is, in the words of one architectural critic, ‘a consummate manifestation of bureaucratic humanity’.5 Above the balcony still stands the high Victorian statuary celebrating the achievements of ‘Commerce’ and ‘Agriculture’, while below West Bengal intellectual life flourishes amid the colonnades’ bookstalls and newspaper vendors. But the incessant, noisy traffic they look out upon no longer crawls around Dalhousie Square (named after the former British governor-general), but Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh – renamed in honour of three Indian nationalist martyrs who in 1930 shot dead Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Skinner Simpson, the inspector general of prisons, at the Writers’ Building before fighting a pitched battle with the police along the corridors. In 2001, Calcutta completed its postcolonial renaming by rechristening the entire city with the more Bengali-sounding title of Kolkata.

  Bengal’s role within the story of Indian independence – providing the heartland of India’s radical political tradition; forcing (as we shall see) the movement of the British capital to New Delhi in 1911; and fostering the most left-wing response to any vestige of colonial capitalism in its trenchant support for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Communist Part
y of India (Marxist-Leninist) – might naturally produce expectations of an unforgiving approach to its imperial past. And yet all around BBD Bagh, in the old Dihi Kalikata district, the imperial fabric is exceptionally well preserved. ‘No longer is there an anxiety that we have to be anticolonial,’ explains the municipal commissioner, Alapan Bandyopadhyay.6 You certainly get a sense of that cultural confidence when stepping into the colonnaded portico of St Andrew’s Kirk, a crisp Regency replica of London’s St Martins-in-the-Fields, down the road from the Writers’ Building and recently restored as a reminder of the Scottish contribution to the growth of early Calcutta. By contrast, the elegiac grandeur of nearby St John’s Church is fiercely Anglican. Its steeple rises high above the skyline, its walls are littered with tablets to the fallen foot soldiers of the imperial mission – men like Michael Cheese Esq., ‘Surgeon on the Honourable Company’s Bengal Establishment, and Garrison Surgeon of Fort William. Dedicated by Public Contribution, In Token of the High Esteem of this Community for the Enlarged and Practical Philanthropy of that Gentleman’s Character’. The memorials continue in the church grounds, between the banana plants and corrugated iron railings, to the ‘well-loved and respected’ ‘Begum’ Frances Johnson (and her four marriages), Vice Admiral Charles Watson and ‘Jobus Charnock’ – Job Charnock, founder of modern Calcutta. Removed from Dalhousie Square in 1940, the Viceroy Lord Curzon’s memorial to the Black Hole of Calcutta – ‘To the Memory of 123 Persons, Who Perished in the Black Hole prison of Old Fort William, On the night of the 20th of June, 1756’ – also lingers here as a reminder of one of the most elemental identifiers of Calcutta in the British colonial psyche and as justification for so much imperial assertiveness.7

  Curzon’s other great monument – the Victoria Memorial – retains its original position, resplendent on the southern edge of Kolkata’s vast city park, the Maidan. Indeed, almost every element of central Kolkata retains its sweeping imperial sense of metropolitan enormity. Conceived in 1905 and completed in 1921, the memorial was to be the British Empire’s answer to the Taj Mahal, using the same marble (from Makrana in Jodhpur) and combining grandiose, Edwardian Baroque architecture with Saracenic styling, ‘a suggestion of orientalism in the arrangement of the domes and minor details’. Curzon wanted this sepulchral homage to the late queen empress to be ‘a building stately, spacious, monumental and grand … where all classes will learn the lessons of history and see revived before their eyes the marvels of the past’.8 Today, as a heritage site-cum-museum, it does just that. Of course, the collections have changed from the days of Curzon, when the monument’s compact, little museum was replete with artefacts of colonial conquest; now, the installations tell the story of modern Bengal through its heritage of visual arts to a predominantly Indian audience of local sightseers. But in a corner of the Persian Room, the colonial past stands firm in the form of a very svelte statue of Wellesley – hand on hip; peerage robes, Caesar-cropped hair, angular nose, scroll in hand – looking every bit the imperial general. It was erected, the inscription reads, ‘by the British inhabitants of Bengal in testimony of their high sense of the wisdom, energy, and rectitude of his administration’.