Cities of Empire
Page 61
Where Afric’s sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand,
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error’s chain.
* And it was all for a great cause. ‘The war, when it comes, will not be for opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people’ was how the sanctimonious Calcutta merchant Benjamin Burnham frames it in Amitav Ghosh’s colonial-era novel Sea of Poppies. ‘Free Trade is a right conferred on Man by God, and its principles apply as much to opium as to any other article of trade. More so perhaps, since in its absence many millions of natives would be denied the lasting advantage of British influence.’ See Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (London, 2009), p. 120.
* A hundred years later Hong Kong’s last governor, Chris Patten, put it in similar terms: ‘A great Chinese city created by the fabulous energies of extraordinarily hard-working and audacious people’ (Financial Times, 30 June 1997).
* From 2015, the building is set to revert to its original function as the Court of Final Appeal.
* The Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli had flatteringly laid the title on her in 1876.
* The title ‘viceroy and governor-general’ was another innovation following the Indian Mutiny, signalling the expanded role of the governor-general now that the British government had assumed the functions of the East India Company. The viceroy was the sovereign’s representative in India.
* In its corporate, technocratic structure, the office of the commissioner is probably best compared with London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, which was allowed unfettered authority in the aftermath of the 1858 ‘Great Stink’ (when the Thames nearly stopped flowing outside the Houses of Parliament due to the amount of human waste clogging it up) and placed in total charge of improvements to the capital in order to by-pass the ancient nexus of warring parishes and councils.
* Not all of it to critical approval. By the interwar years, Bombay’s architecture was regularly attacked for its garish miscegenation. The critic and traveller Robert Byron called Bombay an ‘architectural Sodom’, arguing that ‘the nineteenth century devised nothing lower than the municipal buildings of British India. Their ugliness is positively daemonic. The traveller feels that the English have set the mark of the beast on a land full of artistry and good example.’ Aldous Huxley concurred, thinking Bombay was ‘one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere. It had the misfortune to develop during what was, perhaps, the darkest period of all architectural history.’ See Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj (London, 1985).
* The indigenous population of Australia declined from approximately 750,000 in 1788 to 31,000 in 1911 (The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, Volume 2 (Canberra, 1994)). In 2011, the Australia Bureau of Statistics listed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population as 548,370.
* The literature of the late nineteenth century on ‘Greater Britain’ and the ‘Expansion of England’ used English and British fairly interchangeably. If there was a difference, there was a sense of English cultural sensibilities and habits, while British identity emphasized a harder-edged, geo-political reality – neither of which precluded the other.
* See here.
* It is interesting to contrast Jawaharlal Nehru’s inheritance of New Delhi with his comments on Punjab’s new capital city of Chandigarh. ‘I am very happy that the people of Punjab did not make the mistake of putting some old city as their new capital. It would have been a great mistake and foolishness. It is not merely a question of buildings. If you had chosen an old city as the capital, Punjab would have become a mentally stagnant, backward state. It may have made some progress, with great effort, but it could not have taken a grand step forward.’ See Pavan K. Varma, Becoming Indian (New Delhi, 2010), p. 115.
* See above, p. 62.
* In fact, Shahjahanabad was regarded as the seventh city of Delhi. The others, beginning in the tenth century, were Quila Rai Pithora, Mehrauli, Siri, Tughlakabad, Firozabad and Shergarh. New Delhi was promoted by the British as Delhi’s eighth and final city.
* A plaque on the wall of the nearby Nook pub (now boarded up) on Nelson Street declares itself, ‘the centre of the oldest Chinatown in Europe and this pub, The Nook, became the Chinese “local” in 1940’.
* The Sterling Area was a collection of mostly colonies and dominions of the British Empire (after 1949, the Commonwealth) which were heavily dependent upon the British market, did most of their trade in sterling, fixed their own currencies in relation to the pound and held some or all of their reserves in sterling.