Cities of Empire
Page 48
But it is now a different empire that the Port of Liverpool is servicing. In a total reversal of Lancashire and Liverpool’s old export economy, the plan is for Chinese imports to be sailed down the Mersey and then transported along the Manchester Ship Canal straight into the north-west of England. This is Britain and Europe ‘opened up’. Whereas once the produce of Chester, Manchester, Blackburn and Stoke-on-Trent would have flowed out of the Mersey to the free ports of Shanghai, Ningpo and Canton, now the consumer durables of Shenzhen, Tianjin and Guangzhou are heading into Britain through the Liverpool littoral. Their plastic and electronic wares will be unloaded at the ‘trading outpost’ of the £175 million Peel International Trade Centre, a vast warehousing and wholesaling facility. This modern-day godown – essentially a version of Jardine and Matheson’s dockside developments of 1840s Hong Kong – is a 232,000-square-metre centre providing self-contained units for over 1,000 companies, drawn mainly from China and India, to sell, exhibit and distribute goods to European wholesale buyers. The International Trade Centre is set to complement the ‘multimodal freight terminal’ of Port Salford (with its 153,000 square metres of warehousing) and the suitably titled ‘East Float’ development at Wirral Waters. Behind Peel’s development plans is a powerful set of Chinese investors. Heading the consortium is the Sam Wa Group, ‘a global minerals importer and exporter based in Hong Kong and Jiangsu’. The Sam Wa Group’s wealth is rooted in a series of exotic interests – jewellery exports to Jordan, manganese and copper mining in the Philippines, the American Banking Centre in Guangzhou (old Canton) – reminiscent of Joseph Conrad-style trading companies. And, as with many of the best colonial concerns, few in Liverpool seem interested in questioning the origins of these investment funds.65
Most startling of all within the Peel Group master scheme is its proposal to transform the UNESCO-listed Liverpool waterfront. Right next to the Three Graces, elegantly and elegiacally set back from the Mersey’s edge, is planned a sixty-storey Shanghai Tower, which will entirely dwarf the Royal Liver Building. With it will come a ‘Shanghai-style’ high-rise waterfront – the Bund returning to reshape the cityscape which first inspired it – as well as 9,000 flats, office blocks, hotels, shops and restaurants. Not everyone along the Mersey is enamoured of the scheme. Faced with the transformation of its peninsula by Peel Holdings, in 2010 the Wirral Society of local conservationists condemned those ‘who are dead set on restructuring the riverside entrance into the port of Liverpool in the style of Sydney, New York or Shanghai’. In the diffident language of a regional conservation group, they suggested, ‘it is very feasible that many Wirralians will not like the idea of being Shanghai’d’. By contrast, in terms immediately reminiscent of those civic leaders in Dublin and Mumbai keen to expunge the remnants of a colonial history and embrace the globalized future, the leader of Liverpool City Council defended the Peel Group plan. ‘We do not live in the past. We are not a museum.’ Progress and growth mean facing up to often uncomfortable imperial realities.66
The people of the Wirral might well not want to be Shanghai’d. But, as Joseph Conrad first warned, Empire ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much’. After centuries of exporting our power abroad, Britain is now on the receiving end of Empire. American money is retreating and, in its place, influence and investment from China, India, South America and the Gulf States is flooding in. These sovereign wealth funds, well-oiled dynasties and state-backed banks are buying out businesses and funding infrastructure; taking over football clubs and endowing art galleries; reshaping neighbourhoods and concentrating wealth. A new imperial landscape is emerging. As in the British Empire before it, this history is being revealed through the streets and squares, sewers and monuments, architecture and corporations of our own freshly colonized cities.
BOSTON
1. ‘On Friday, September 30th, 1768, the ships of WAR, armed Schooners, Transports, etc. Came up the Harbour and Anchored round the TOWN.’ Paul Revere’s engraving of British troops landing at Long Wharf, Boston.
2. The execution of the innocents. Paul Revere’s depiction of the ‘Boston Massacre’ of 1770, against a backdrop of the Old State House.
3. A view of Boston Common in 1768, with John Hancock’s house in the top right-hand corner.
4. Samuel Adams defending the Magna Carta rights of Boston against British tyranny, as caught by John Singleton Copley (1770).
5. An Empire of Goods. A British teapot (c. 1766–1770s), made in Derby, commemorating the repeal of the Stamp Act.
6. ‘Boston Harbor a tea-pot this night!’ An heroic depiction of the Boston Tea-Party, with the leaves falling into the waves and the rebels dressed as Mohawks, from the Reverend Mr Cooper’s History of North America (1789).
BRIDGETOWN
7. ‘This Little Spot of Ground … has been as good as a Mine of Silver or Gold to the Crown of England.’ The Nicholas Abbey plantation and sugar mills, the property of Sir John Gay Alleyne, Speaker of the House of Assembly (1767–97), were amongst the most productive in Barbados.
8. Barbados Governor Sir Thomas Robinson travels to St Michael’s Church in this anonymous panorama of c. 1742. A busy Carlisle Bay is overlooked by the Charles and Willoughby forts, while the Bridgetown skyline shows the presence of Dutch gable roof tops.
9. Rachel Pringle – slave; free-woman; property owner; associate of Prince Henry – depicted in her youth and maturity by Thomas Rowlandson (1796).
DUBLIN
10. ‘They will follow me wherever I go.’ Leinster House, Dublin, print by Thomas Malton (1745).
11. Portico frieze of James Gandon’s Custom House, Dublin, showing Hibernia and Britannia seated on a car of shell, Neptune driving away Famine and Despair, with a fleet approaching under full sail (1791).
12. The Corbally family in a Georgian interior in Dublin, 1770s, attributed to Strickland Lowry. Signs of prosperity abound: the fiddle-grate for coal-burning; Irish Chippendale chairs; patterned carpet; and costly wallpaper depicting classical architecture.
13. Henry Grattan (in red, on the right) addressing the Irish House of Commons, 1780, by Francis Wheatley.
CAPE TOWN
14. Waves and clouds crashing around the whitewashed Dutch cityscape of Cape Town and the unmistakable rise of Table Mountain, painted by William Hodges (1772).
15. ‘Considered as an entrepot between Europe and Asia, it has every advantage that can be wished.’ East Indiamen off Cape Town, by Thomas Whitcombe (1820).
CALCUTTA
16. Fort William on the Hooghly River, here painted by Francis Swainer, gives visitors to Calcutta an immediate sense of the permanence and power of the British Empire in Bengal (1763).
17. Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, hero of the Maratha wars, smoking a hookah and embracing the Orientalist attractions of service in India (c. 1800).
18. ‘It being the general custom of Bengal in those days to drink freely and to assemble in numerous parties at each other’s houses.’ William Hickey’s Calcutta on display at a levée at Old Government House (1792).
19. The Glorious Little Man. Richard Wellesley, Governor General of India, by Thomas Lawrence (1813).
20. Kedleston in Calcutta: Wellesley’s ‘original great palace of British India’, Government House (1848) painted by Charles d’Oyly.
21. ‘The most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of.’ Opium Clipper Waterwitch in Calcutta (c. 1850).
HONG KONG
22. ‘The imperial powers descended on China like a swarm of bees.’ Treaty of Nanjing (1842).
23. East Point, Hong Kong, with the residence and godowns of Jardine, Matheson & Co (mid-nineteenth century).
24. The Fragrant Harbour becomes one of the busiest shipping stations in the world, as depicted in an 1860s watercolour by Marciano Baptista.
25. Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, from the clock tower looking towards the east. Decorations for HRH the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit can be seen on the buildings (1868).
BOMBAY
; 26. Merchant prince, Parsi philanthropist and urban improver: Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and his Chinese servant, by George Chinnery (c. 1830s).
27. ‘Bombay has long been the Liverpool of the East – she is now becoming the Manchester also.’ Parsee cotton merchants of Bombay. Illustration from The Countries of the World by Robert Brown (London, 1876–92).
28. Engineer of Empire: Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay, by Sir George Reid (1881).
29. The Indo-Saracenic Gormenghast of Bombay Victoria Terminus (right) – ‘the truly central building of the entire British Empire’ with the Municipal Corporation Building behind, as photographed by Raja Deendayal (c. 1893).
30. Ruskin’s Venetian Gothic shapes the urban fabric of Victorian Bombay. Sir George Gilbert Scott’s University Library, complete with Ca’ d’Oro styling (1878).
31. Buried amidst the pineapples of Crawford Market, a gleefully ornamental water fountain designed by William Emerson and encased with decorative panels by Lockwood Kipling (1869).
MELBOURNE
32. ‘The heaps of rustling leaves, as they chase each other on the gravelled walks, give an English air to the scene.’ Melbourne viewed from the Botanic Garden, by Henry Gritten (1867).
33. ‘And that true spirit of the British race / Which makes the wilderness a dwelling place.’ Cantata from the 1880–81 Melbourne International Exhibition.
34. Melbourne’s suburban civilization. Sands & McDougalls Tramway Map (1880s).
35. W. G. Grace and other members of the England national cricket team take advantage of Australia’s ‘old love for the manly sports of the mother country’ with a 29-match tour (1891–2).
36. The ‘crimson thread of kinship’ demands the ultimate sacrifice. The Australian Imperial Force parading through Collins Street, Melbourne, before departing for the battlefields of the First World War (1915).
NEW DELHI
37. Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad, pays homage to King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary at the Delhi Durbar (1911).
38. The Versailles of British India. An aerial view looking East, showing Kingsway (the Rajpath) with Viceroy House and Gardens (1947).
39. ‘It must not be Indian, nor English, nor Roman, but it must be Imperial.’ View of the east end of Herbert Baker’s North Block, Secretariat Building, with Council House in background (1931).
40. A seditious Middle-Temple lawyer and Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten of Burma take tea at the Viceroy’s House on the eve of Indian Independence (1947).
LIVERPOOL
41. ‘Today, all seas lead to Liverpool.’ Merseyside’s Atlantic traffic as charted in a Dominion Line poster (1899).
42. View outside the Chinese shops in Pitt Street, Liverpool, from H. Scheffauer’s article, ‘The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem’, in the London Magazine, June 1911.
43. ‘Abundant signs of illimitable expansiveness and invincible virility.’ Liverpool caught at the peak of its powers in a panorama by Walter Richards (1907).
44. Everything going wrong: rioting on the streets of Toxteth, 6 July 1981.
45. Gateway of Empire. The prospective Liverpool Waters as imagined by the Peel Group, with the original Three Graces in the foreground.
Bibliography
Primary sources in chapters 1–10 are listed before secondary works.
GENERAL
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INTRODUCTION
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CHAPTER 1: BOSTON
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