Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Fryer, P., Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984).

  Haggerty, S., Webster, A. and White, N. J. (eds.), The Empire in One City? (Manchester, 2008).

  Hyde, F., Liverpool and the Mersey: An Economic History of a Port (Newton Abbot, 1971).

  Kumar, K., ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’, in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012).

  Lane, T., Liverpool: Gateway of Empire (London, 1987).

  Lewis, B., ‘So Clean’: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilisation (Manchester, 2008).

  Mahler, V., ‘Britain, the European Community, and the Developing Commonwealth: Dependence, Interdependence, and the Political Economy of Sugar’, International Organization, 35, 3 (1981).

  May, R. and Cohen, R., ‘The Interaction between Race and Colonialism: A Case Study of the Liverpool Race Riots of 1919’, Race and Class, 16, 2 (1974).

  Munck, R. (ed.), Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective (Liverpool, 2002).

  Sacks, D. H. and Lynch, M., ‘Ports 1540–1700’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2000).

  Sharples, J., Liverpool, Pevsner Architectural Guides (London, 2004).

  Steele, M., ‘Transmitting Ideas of Empire: Representations and Celebrations in Liverpool, 1886–1953’, in S. Haggerty, A. Webster and N. J. White (eds.), The Empire in One City? (Manchester, 2008).

  Summerson, J., The Unromantic Castle and Other Essays (London, 1990).

  Taylor, A. J. P., ‘Manchester’, Encounter, 8, 3 (1957).

  Thompson, A. (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012).

  Tomlinson, J., ‘The Empire/Commonwealth in British Economic Thinking and Policy’, in A. Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012).

  Watson, J. A., The End of a Liverpool Landmark: The Last Years of Love Lane Refinery (London, 1985).

  White, N. J., ‘Liverpool Shipping and the End of Empire: The Ocean Group in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1973’, in S. Haggerty, A. Webster and N. J. White (eds.), The Empire in One City? (Manchester, 2008).

  Wilks-Heeg, S., ‘From World City to Pariah City? Liverpool and the Global Economy, 1850–2000’, in R. Munck (ed.), Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective (Liverpool, 2002).

  Notes

  Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

  INTRODUCTION

    1. Chris Patten, East and West (London, 1998), pp. 84, 85.

    2. The Economist, 28 June 1997.

    3. Daily Mail, 25 June 1997.

    4. New Statesman, 11 July 1997.

    5. Independent, 1 July 1997.

    6. Tony Blair, A Journey (London, 2010), p. 126.

    7. Quoted in Daily Mail, 23 February 2006.

    8. For the most popular recent works, see: Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire (London, 2011); Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire (London, 2011); Jeremy Paxman, Empire (London, 2011); John Darwin, Unfinished Empire (London, 2012); as well as the multiple publications emerging from the Oxford History of the British Empire series. For an insightful commentary on this cultural moment, see Pankaj Mishra, ‘Guilt and Glory’, Financial Times, 22–3 October 2011.

    9. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003), pp. xxi, 358.

  10. Gott (2011), pp. 1–8.

  11. See Katie Engelhart, ‘Rule Britannia: Empire on Trial’, World Policy Journal, 29, 4 (2012–13).

  12. Hansard (Commons), 6 June 2013, c. 1692.

  13. Guardian, 18 January 2003.

  14. Jan Morris and Simon Winchester, Stones of Empire (Oxford, 2005), p. 196.

  15. Darwin (2012), p. 11. See also, Andrew Porter, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999). Nicholas B. Dirks is withering about such ‘nuance’: ‘a post-imperial sigh of relief has been almost audible in some recent writing, in which the historical stance of objectivity is said to be possible now that historians no longer need to take sides … It is one thing to argue that the experience and ideological presuppositions of the colonizers are deserving of historical attention … It is altogether different to assert that because there were perceived “affinities”, say, between metropolitan and colonial elites, the fundamental notions of empire were not driven by racial and cultural prejudice.’ See Dirks, The Scandal of Empire (London, 2006), pp. 27, 332–3.

  16. Peter Cunningham (ed.), The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford (London, 1858), vol. 3, p. 496; J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1895), p. 10; Kwarteng (2011), p. 3.

  17. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, 1975), p. 14.

  18. Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire (Princeton, 2012), p. xii.

  19. Nicholas Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire: An Introduction’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998), p. 10.

  20. See Robert Ross and Gerald J. Telkamp (eds.), Colonial Cities (Leiden, 1985).

  21. See Anthony D. King, ‘Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change’, in ibid.

  22. Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities, McKinsey Global Institute Report, March 2011.

  23. Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, 1991), pp. 3–4.

  24. The Sunday Times, 31 January 2010.

  25. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London, 2006), p. 96. See also Eric Lewis Beverley, ‘Colonial Urbanism and South Asian Cities’, Social History, 36, 4 (2011).

  26. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), p. 15.

  27. Dirks (2006), p. 330.

  CHAPTER 1: BOSTON

    1. The above account is based on Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (London, 2010), pp. 117–40.

    2. John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and Various Other Occurrences in the Church of England, vol. 2 (London, 1725), p. 595, quoted in Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop (Oxford, 2003), p. 181; see also Bremer’s entry on Winthrop in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

    3. John Winthrop, Reasons for the Plantation in New England (c. 1628), quoted in Alden T. Vaughan (ed.), The Puritan Tradition in America (Hanover, N. H., 1997), p. 26.

    4. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston (Boston, 1871), p. 16.

    5. John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630), p. 1, quoted in Bremer (2003), p. 179.

    6. Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial (Boston, 1772), p. 91, quoted in Shurtleff (1871), p. 28.

    7. See Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston (Chapel Hill, 1975).

    8. William Wood, ‘New England’s Prospect’, in Alexander Young (ed.), Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1846), pp. 397, 398–9; quoted in Shurtleff (1871), pp. 40, 41.

    9. John Winthrop to Henry Oldenburg, 12 November 1668, in Robert Winthrop (ed.), Correspondence of Hartlib, Haak, Oldenburg and Others of the Royal Society with Governor Winthrop of Connecticut, 1661–1672 (Boston, 1878), pp. 34–5.

  10. See Virginia DeJohn Anderson, ‘New England in the Seventeenth Century’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998).

  11. Vaughan (1997), p. 29.

  12. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop 1649 (1996), pp. 280–81.

  13. Mark van Doren (ed.), Samuel Sewall Diary (New York, 1963), p. 29.

  14. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

  15. J. Franklin Jameson (ed.), Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England (1654) (N
ew York, 1910), p. 71.

  16. Winthrop (1996), p. 72.

  17. Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston (Boston, 1882), vol. 1, p. 496.

  18. George Winship (ed.), Boston in 1682 and 1699: A Trip to New England by Edward Ward and A Letter from New England by J. W. (Providence, 1905), p. 43, quoted in Shurtleff (1871), p. 56.

  19. Winthrop (1996), p. 432.

  20. See Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia, 2011), p. 96.

  21. Van Doren (1963), p. 21.

  22. Ibid.

  23. B. Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793) (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 10.

  24. Winsor (1882), vol. 1, p. 483.

  25. Quoted in Rutman (1975), p. 272.

  26. Christopher P. Magra, The Fisherman’s Cause: Atlantic Commerce and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 2009), p. 79.

  27. Shurtleff (1871), p. 50.

  28. James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts (Boston, 1910), p. 298.

  29. See Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

  30. Winsor (1882), vol. 1, p. 499.

  31. John Dunton, John Dunton’s Letters from New England (Boston, 1867), p. 67.

  32. Rev. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England (London, 1702), p. 31.

  33. L. H. Butterfield (ed.), The Adams Papers: Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), vol. 1, p. 81.

  34. Daniel Neal, History of New England (London, 1720), p. 225.

  35. Dunton (1867), pp. 68–9.

  36. Neal (1720), p. 225.

  37. Dunton (1867), pp. 78, 79, 80, 88.

  38. See Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, 2007); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (Oxford, 1970).

  39. Neal (1720), p. 228.

  40. See ‘The British Conception of Empire in the Eighteenth Century’, in David Armitage, Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (Aldershot, 2004); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America (Chapel Hill, 1985).

  41. T. H. Breen, ‘“Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 119 (1988), p. 86.

  42. C. Ferguson, A Letter Address’d to Every Honest Man in Britain (London, 1738), p. 17.

  43. Located online in Adams Papers of the US National Archives: http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-04-02-0001-0035.

  44. John Adams, ‘Essay No. III – On Private Revenge’, Boston Gazette, 5 September 1763.

  45. Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat (London, 2007), pp. 426, 393.

  46. Harlow Giles Unger, John Hancock (New York, 2000), p. 52.

  47. Esmond Wright, Benjamin Franklin: His Life as He Wrote It (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 155.

  48. See Unger (2000).

  49. See W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock (Cambridge, Mass., 1945).

  50. Butterfield (1961), vol. 1, p. 294.

  52. Bernard Bailyn, ‘1776: A Year of Challenge – a World Transformed’, Journal of Law and Economics, 19 (1976), p. 447.

  53. Leonard W. Labaree (ed.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 2006), vol. 4, p. 229.

  54. Franklin (2005), p. 11.

  55. Carp (2010), p. 56. See also, pp. 49–57.

  56. Information provided by Dr Gaye Blake-Roberts, director of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent.

  57. Shurtleff (1871), pp. 64, 88.

  58. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1977), p. 38. See also, T. H. Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies, 25, 4 (1986).

  59. Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces (Chapel Hill, 2006), p. 7.

  60. See Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1992).

  61. Quoted in McConville (2006), p. 260.

  62. Anne Rowe (ed.), Letters and Diary of John Rowe (New York, 1969), p. 117.

  63. Ibid., p. 68.

  64. Ibid., p. 114.

  65. Rev. Andrew Burnaby, Travels through the Middle Settlements in North-America. In the Years 1759 and 1760 (London, 1775), p. 142. See also Holtz Kay, Lost Boston (1980).

  66. Shurtleff (1871), p. 69.

  67. Thomas Pownall, Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764), p. 9, quoted in Peter Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2004), p. 211.

  68. See P. J. Marshall, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).

  69. The Works of Benjamin Franklin (Boston, 1837), vol. 4, p. 89, quoted in Simms (2007), p. 539.

  70. See Eliga H. Gould, ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World (Basingstoke, 2002).

  71. Quoted in Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War (London, 2011), p. 322.

  72. Rowe (1969), p. 89.

  73. See E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993).

  74. Butterfield (1961), vol. 2, p. 74.

  75. John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (Oxford, 2002), p. 20; see also Stewart Beach, Samuel Adams: The Fateful Years (Cornwallis, 1965).

  76. Rowe (1969), p. 95.

  77. Butterfield (1961), vol. 1, p. 316.

  78. Carp (2010), p. 55.

  79. Unger (2000), p. 133.

  80. Breen (1988), p. 92.

  81. Carp (2010), pp. 67–9.

  82. Quoted in Carp (2007), p. 23.

  83. Rowe (1969), p. 198.

  84. Butterfield (1961), vol. 3, pp. 291–2.

  85. Rowe (1969), p. 199.

  86. Carp (2010), p. 21.

  87. Papers of John Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1977), p. 147.

  88. Rowe (1969), p. 254.

  89. Butterfield (1961), vol. 2, p. 86.

  90. Ibid., p. 86.

  91. Rowe (1969), p. 291.

  92. Carp (2010), p. 191.

  93. William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England (London, 1806–20), vol. 18, cols. 798–9.

  CHAPTER 2: BRIDGETOWN

    1. William Dickson, Letters on Slavery (London, 1789), pp. 29–30.

    2. See Pedro Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680–1834 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 164–5.

    3. Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 489.

    4. H. Frere, A Short History of Barbados (London, 1768), pp. 115–16.

    5. A. J. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 3.

    6. Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery (London, 1974), p. 124.

    7. J. A. Froude, The English in the West Indies (London, 1888), p. 38.

    8. Quoted in Welch (2003), p. 54.

    9. Quoted in Robert B. Potter and Mark Wilson, ‘Barbados’, in Robert B. Potter (ed.), Urbanization, Planning and Development in the Caribbean (London, 1989), p. 123.

  10. The Winthrop Papers, vol. 1: 1498–1628 (Boston, 1925), pp. 356–7.

  11. Hilary M. Beckles, A History of Barbados (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 6–13.

  12. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (London, 1708), pp. 78–9.

  13. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London,
1673), p. 25.

  14. John Eaden (ed.), The Memoirs of Père Labat (1693–1705) (London, 1931), p. 120.

  15. Ligon (1673), p. 85.

  16. See Jack P. Greene, ‘Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study’, in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World (Princeton, 1987).

  17. Beckles (1990), p. 27.

  18. Quoted in Richard Drayton, ‘The Collaboration of Labour: Slaves, Empires and Globalizations in the Atlantic World, c. 1600–1850’, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002).

  19. Anon., News from Barbadoes (London, 1676), p. 26.

  20. Oldmixon (1708), p. 162.

  21. John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies (1735) (London, 1970) p. 206.

  22. Peter Quennell (ed.), Memoirs of William Hickey (London, 1960), p. 190.

  23. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London, 1997).

  24. Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War (London, 2011), p. 296.

  25. James Walvin, Atlas of Slavery (Edinburgh, 2006).

  26. See Blackburn (1997).

  27. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (London, 1794), p. 51.

  28. See Blackburn (1997).

  29. V. T. Harlow, A History of Barbados (Oxford, 1926), pp. 292–3.

  30. Equiano (1794), p. 54.

  31. Ibid., p. 56.

  32. Oldmixon (1708), p. 117.

  33. Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London, 1798) pp. 186, 187.

  34. Equiano (1794), p. 57.

  35. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London, 2001), p. 10.

  36. Eaden (1931), p. 126.

  37. Dickson (1789), p. 34.

  38. See Blackburn (1997).

  39. Oldmixon (1708), pp. 118–19.

  40. Karl Marx, Capital (London, 1990), pp. 915, 918.

  41. Daniel Defoe, Review, 44, 10 January 1713, p. 89, quoted in Peter Earle The World of Defoe (London, 1976), p. 130.

  42. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 102.

  43. See Welch (2003), p. 57; Richard B. Sheridan, ‘Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689–1748’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).