Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

70. Worden et al. (1998), p. 117.

  71. Burchell (1822), p. 28.

  72. Millar (1965), p. 64.

  73. C. Pama, Regency Cape Town (Cape Town, 2008), p. 79.

  74. See Worden et al. (1998); Viney and Simons (1994).

  75. Burchell (1822), p. 74.

  76. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire, in Every Quarter of the World, Including the East Indies (London, 1815), p. 88; see alse John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2012).

  CHAPTER 5: CALCUTTA

    1. Quoted in Iris Butler, The Eldest Brother: The Marquess of Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s Eldest Brother (London, 1973), p. 134.

    2. George, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India (London, 1809), vol. 1, pp. 61–2, 235–6.

    3. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh, 1813), p. 138.

    4. Quoted in Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India (London, 1989), p. 312.

    5. Brian Paul Bach, Calcutta’s Edifice: The Buildings of a Great City (New Delhi, 2006), p. 189.

    6. New York Times, 29 April 2009.

    7. On the cultural significance of the Black Hole and the manipulation of its memory, see Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire (Princeton, 2012).

    8. Jan Morris and Simon Winchester, Stones of Empire (Oxford, 2005), pp. 116–17.

    9. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois At Last?’, in The Politics of the Governed (New York, 2004).

  10. Rudyard Kipling, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places (Allahabad, 1891), p. 1.

  11. Somini Sengupta, ‘A Walk in Calcutta’, New York Times, 29 April 2009.

  12. Guardian, 2 February 2013.

  13. Financial Times, 10 June 2011.

  14. Kipling (1891), p. 2.

  15. Geoffrey Moorhouse, Calcutta (London, 1998), pp. 31–2.

  16. See Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World (London, 2006), pp. 8, 27–8, 43.

  17. See P. J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia, 1700–1765’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).

  18. John Horwell, A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Death of the English Gentlemen, and Others, Who were Suffocated in the Black–Hole in Fort William, in the Kingdom of Bengal; in the Night Succeeding the 20th Day of June, 1756, quoted in Chatterjee (2012), p. 23.

  19. Robins (2006), pp. 68–9.

  20. John Dowie (ed.), Macaulay’s Essay on Clive (1840) (London, 1900), pp. 1–2.

  21. See H. V. Bowen, ‘Robert Clive’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2008).

  22. Dowie (1900), pp. 74–5.

  23. William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs (London, 1772), p. 74.

  24. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. 23, p. 387: http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence.

  25. Bolts (1772), p. v.

  26. Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Mr Fox’s East India Bill’, 1 December 1783.

  27. See Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (Cambridge, 2007).

  28. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 23, pp. 381, 387: http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence.

  29. See Pradip Sinha, ‘Calcutta and the Currents of History, 1690–1912’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Calcutta: The Living City (Oxford, 1990).

  30. Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India (Calcutta, 1817), p. 238.

  31. Quoted in Denis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608 –1937 (London, 1938), p. 22; quoted in J. P. Losty, Calcutta: City of Palaces (London, 1990), p. 45; Graham (1813), pp. 132–3.

  32. John Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies (London, 1798), vol. 1, pp. 497–8.

  33. See Losty (1990); Dhrubajyoti Banerjea, European Calcutta (New Delhi, 2005).

  34. Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (London, 1777), pp. 277–8; Fay (1817), p. 240; Graham (1813), p. 153.

  35. Kindersley (1777), pp. 278, 274; Peter Quennell (ed.), Memoirs of William Hickey (London, 1960), p. 237; S. Shushtari, Kitab Tuhfat al-‘Alam (Bombay, 1847), p. 427, quoted in William Dalrymple, White Mughals (London, 2004), p. 408.

  36. See Dalrymple (2004).

  37. Samita Gupta, ‘Theory and Practice of Town Planning in Calcutta, 1817–1912: An Appraisal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 30, 1 (1993), p. 34. See also Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London, 2005).

  38. G. G. Nichols, ‘Field Book, Survey of a Part of Calcutta’ (1809), MS Collection in the National Library of India, Calcutta, quoted in S. N. Mukherjee, Calcutta: Essays in Urban History (Calcutta, 1993), p. 59.

  39. Quoted in Moorhouse (1998), p. 75.

  40. Anon., Hartly House, Calcutta: A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings (London, 1989), pp. 13, 18.

  41. Quoted in Dalrymple (2004), p. 411.

  42. Quennell (1960), pp. 240, 248.

  43. Losty (1990), p. 56.

  44. Roger Hudson (ed.), William Hickey: Memoirs of a Georgian Rake (London, 1995), pp. 386–7.

  45. Fay (1817), pp. 255, 271.

  46. Hudson (1995), p. 388.

  47. Graham (1813), p. 139.

  48. See Prosenjit Das Gupta, Ten Walks in Calcutta (Kolkata, 2008), pp. 8–10.

  49. Anne Catherine Monkland, Life in India: or, The English at Calcutta (London, 1828), vol. 1, pp. 192–3.

  50. C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (London, 1996), pp. 3–4.

  51. See Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2006).

  52. P. J. Marshall (ed.), The British Discovery of Hinduism (Cambridge, 1970), p. 189. See also P. J. Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  53. See Michael J. Franklin, ‘Sir William Jones’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  54. See Dermot Killingley, ‘Rammohun Roy’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  55. See Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke, 2007).

  56. Chatterjee (2012), p. 129.

  57. J. R. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta, 1837), p. 19.

  58. Valentia (1809), vol. 1, p. 237.

  59. See Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 59, 2 (2000).

  60. Kindersley (1777), p. 277.

  61. Graham (1813), p. 134.

  62. Quoted in Robins (2006), p. 89.

  63. See C. A. Bayly and Katherine Prior, ‘Charles Cornwallis’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  64. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (New Delhi, 1981).

  65. See Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Calcutta, 1981).

  66. See C. A. Bayly, ‘Richard Wellesley’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  67. The Despatches, Minutes and Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley K.G., During His Administration in India, ed. Montgomery Martin (London, 1836), vol. 2, pp. 38–9, quoted in John Severn, Architects of Empire: The Duke of Wellington and His Brothers (Norman, 2007), p. 103.

  68. Peter Cunningham (ed.), The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford (London, 1858), vol. 3, p. 496.

  69. Sidney J. Owen (ed.), A Selection from the Despatches, Treaties, and Other Papers of the Marquess Wellesley, K.G. during His Government of India (Oxford, 1877), p. 722.

  70. Valentia (1809), vol. 1, p. 251.
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  71. Owen (1877), p. 687.

  72. Edward Ingram (ed.), Two Views of British India: The Private Correspondence of Mr Dundas and Lord Wellesley (Bath, 1970), p. 201. See also, Kapil Raj, ‘Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850’, Osiris, 2nd Series, 15 (2000), p. 125.

  73. ‘Sketches of India’, Calcutta Journal, New Series, 1 (3 January 1822), p. 26, quoted in David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969), p. 63.

  74. Essays by Students of the College of Fort William in Bengal (Calcutta, 1820), vol. 2, p. xii.

  75. Mornington to Grenville, 18 November 1798, Dropmore Papers, British Library, 4:382–4, quoted in Severn (2007), p. 90.

  76. Morris and Winchester (2005), p. 67.

  77. Lord Curzon, British Government in India (London, 1925), vol. 1, p. 41.

  78. W. S. Seton-Karr (ed.), Selections from Calcutta Gazettes (London, 1864–9), vol. 3, 24 March 1803.

  79. E. Fenton, The Journal of Mrs Fenton. A Narrative of Her Life in India, the Isle of France, and Tasmania During the Years 1826–30 (London, 1901), p. 249.

  80. Monkland (1828), vol. 1, pp. 198, 200.

  81. Ingram (1970), pp. 145, 240.

  82. Quoted in Losty (1990), p. 71.

  83. Quoted in Chattopadhyay (2005), p. 87.

  84. Martin (1837), p. 23.

  85. A. M. Lewin Robinson (ed.), The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas from the Cape and Elsewhere, 1793–1803 (Cape Town, 1973), p. 274.

  86. Ingram (1970), p. 287; Owen (1877), p. 697.

  87. Severn (2007).

  88. Curzon (1925), vol. 2, pp. 173–4.

  89. Hudson (1995), p. 405.

  90. H. Woodrow, Macaulay’s Minutes on Education in India, Written in the Years 1835, 1836, and 1837 (Calcutta, 1862), 2 February 1835.

  91. Macaulay in Hansard (Commons), 10 July 1833, vol. 19, cc. 585–6, quoted in E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1963), p. 45.

  92. G. R. Gleig, The Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro (London, 1830), vol. 2, pp. 57, 58; vol. 3, p. 381.

  93. See Anthony Webster, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta (Leicester, 2007).

  94. George Otto Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London, 1881), p. 308.

  95. Kipling (1891), p. 1.

  96. See Mukherjee (1993).

  CHAPTER 6: HONG KONG

    1. Letter from James Matheson to William Jardine, 22 January 1841, Jardine and Matheson Archive, Cambridge University: C5–6, pp. 51–2, quoted in Alain Le Pichon (ed.), China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong 1827–1843 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 464–5.

    2. Sir Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, Performed in Her Majesty’s Ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836–1842 (London, 1843), vol. 2, pp. 147–8.

    3. James Matheson to William Jardine, 30 January 1841, Jardine and Matheson Archive, Cambridge University: C5–6, pp. 64–5, quoted in Le Pichon (2006), p. 468.

    4. Independent, 5 July 1997.

    5. James Pope-Hennessy, Half-Crown Colony (London, 1969), p. 34.

    6. Henry Charles Sirr, China and the Chinese: Their Religion, Character, Customs and Manufactures (London, 1849), p. 2.

    7. See Carl A. Trocki, ‘Drugs, Taxes and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia’, in Timothy Brook and Bon Tadashi Wakabayashi (eds.), Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan (London, 2000).

    8. John Macgowan, How England Saved China (London, 1913), pp. 304–5.

    9. ‘William Jardine’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  10. Jardine and Matheson Archive, Cambridge University: B2/12/21, 24 September 1839; C6/2, 25 May 1842, quoted in Chan Wai Kwan, The Making of Hong Society (Oxford, 1991), pp. 24, 23.

  11. H. Hamilton Lindsay, Letter to the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston on British Relations with China (London, 1836), p. 19.

  12. F. W. Mote, Imperial China 900–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 913.

  13. James Matheson, The Present Position and Prospects of the British Trade with China (London, 1836), p. 1.

  14. Ibid., p. 122.

  15. E. J. Eitel, Europe in China (1895) (Oxford, 1983), p. 25.

  16. Minute by Sir T. S. Raffles on the Establishment of a Malay College at Singapore, 1819, British Library, D742/38, Microfilm No. NAB 083.

  17. Eitel (1983), p. 25.

  18. See Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China (London, 2011), pp. 37–40.

  19. Quoted in Kwan (1991), p. 21.

  20. Eitel (1983), p. 23.

  21. See Le Pichon (2006); ‘William Jardine’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); ‘James Matheson’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or, The Two Nations (1845) (London, 1980), p. 74.

  22. Lydia He Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. 237.

  23. Robert Blake, Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far East (London, 1999), p. 93.

  24. ‘William Jardine’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  25. Belcher (1843), vol. 2, p. 143.

  26. Immanuel Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (Oxford, 2000), pp. 187–8.

  27. Queen Victoria’s letter to the King of the Belgians, 13 April 1841, The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861, vol. 1: 1837–1843 (London, 1907), quoted in Barbara-Sue White (ed.), Hong Kong: Somewhere between Heaven and Earth (Oxford, 1996), p. 26.

  28. See Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai 1843–1937’, Past and Present, 159 (1998).

  29. Hansard (Commons), 8 April 1840, vol. 53, cc. 749–837.

  30. Quoted in Le Pichon (2006), p. 51.

  31. Hansard (Lords), 6 February 1844, vol. 72, cc. 263–8.

  32. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–1842 (Cambridge, 1951), p. 215.

  33. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, 6, 1 (1953).

  34. Hansard (Lords), 6 February 1844, vol. 72, cc. 263–8.

  35. Friend of China, 6 April 1843, p. 15, quoted in C. M. Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong 1841–1880 (Richmond, 2001), p. 28.

  36. Letter from James Matheson to William Jardine, 23 August 1841, Jardine and Matheson Archive, Cambridge University: C5–7, pp. 121–5, quoted in Le Pichon (2006), p. 497.

  37. Kwan (1991), p. 24.

  38. Arthur Cunynghame, An Aide-de-Camp’s Recollections of Service in China (London, 1844), vol. 1, pp. 83–4.

  39. Lord Redesdale, The Attaché at Peking (London, 1900), p. 14, quoted in White (1996), p. 67.

  40. Rev. James Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’ (1872), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, 11 (1971), p. 172.

  41. Ibid., p. 175.

  42. Sirr (1849), pp. 4–5.

  43. Albert Smith, To China and Back (1859) (Hong Kong, 1974), p. 39.

  44. Letter dated 26 January 1845, Letters of Lieutenant Collinson (Collinson MSS) in Hong Kong Public Records Office, quoted in Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (Plymouth, 2007), p. 168.

  45. Osmond Tiffany, The Canton Chinese: or, The American’s Sojourn in the Celestial Empire (Boston, 1849), pp. 259–60, quoted in White (1996), p. 40.

  46. See Jan Morris, Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire (London, 1997).

  47. W. H. Hall and W. D. Bernard, Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis (London, 1845), p. 254.

  48. Ibid., p. 256.

  49.�
��W. M. Wood, Fankwei: or, The San Jacinto in the Seas of India, China and Japan (New York, 1859), p. 267, quoted in Bickers (2011), p. 91.

  50. Sirr (1849), p. 3.

  51. Munn (2001).

  52. Legge (1971), p. 176.

  53. Sirr (1849), p. 38.

  54. The Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2: 1855–1861 (London, 1908), p. 4, quoted in Geoffrey Robley Sayer, Hong Kong: Birth, Adolescence, and Coming of Age (London, 1937), p. 138.

  55. Report from the Select Committee on Commercial Relations with China (London, 1847), p. viii.

  56. Robert Montgomery Martin, ‘Report on Hong Kong’, 24 July 1844, National Archives, London, CO/129/18, quoted in G. B. Endacott (ed.), An Eastern Entrepôt (London, 1964), pp. 99, 102.

  57. The Economist, August 1846.

  58. David R. Meyer, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis (Cambridge, 2000).

  59. G. B. Endacott, A History of Hong Kong (London, 1958).

  60. Morris (1997).

  61. Quoted in Endacott (1964), p. 98.

  62. Ibid., pp. 81–2.

  63. Smith (1974), p. 28.

  64. See Christopher M. Munn, ‘The Hong Kong Opium Revenue, 1845–1885’, in Brook and Wakabayashi (2000).

  65. Quoted in Eitel (1983), p. 571.

  66. New York Daily Tribune, 16 March 1857, 10 April 1857.

  67. The Chinese Repository, 11 (1842), p. 628, quoted in Wong Man Kong, James Legge: A Pioneer at Crossroads of East and West (Hong Kong, 1996), p. 35.

  68. R. G. Milne, Sinim: A Plea for China. A Discourse Delivered in Providence Chapel, Whitehaven (London, 1843), p. 3, quoted in Kong (1996), p. 38.

  69. E. Hodder (ed.), The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (London, 1886), vol. 1, p. 440, quoted in Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag (Leicester, 1990), p. 106.

  70. Reverend George Smith, A Narrative of an Exploratory Visit to each of the Consular Cities of China and to the Islands of Hong Kong and Chusan (London, 1847), p. 446.

  71. Letter from Hong Kong, 25 February 1844, quoted in Helen Edith Legge, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar (London, 1905), p. 49.

  72. Quoted in Kate Lowe, ‘The Beliefs, Aspirations and Methods of the First Missionaries in British Hong Kong, 1841–5’, in Pieter N. Holtrop and Hugh McLeod (eds.), Missions and Missionaries (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 106.