The author posits that the great gift of the Empire, its true legacy, is urbanism. "This book seeks to explore the imperial story through the urban form and its material culture: ten cities telling the story of the British Empire." Commerce was the thread that started to bind the disparately structured (joint stock companies, royal governors, local legislatures, individual patentees) colonies into something resembling a system. The concept of Empire "became much more regularly employed as trade fostered some sense of shared interest and political community across Britain's congeries of territories."
It was "a mercantilist consortium of mutual commercial advantage". However, all of the shared interests, beliefs, convictions, and unifying Protestantism could not survive the imposition of some modest taxes on the Bostonians. The first English city in America became the 'cradle of liberty' and led the march toward the disassembling of the first Empire. When the 13 Colonies left, the West Indies and the sugar trade replaced them in import. Centered in Bridgetown, Barbados, the sugar trade was built upon the foundation of human slavery, a foundation that supported "opulent profits". "The staggering returns from the West Indies colonies funded the acceleration of the British Empire, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the Royal Navy." The author asserts that the harbors, ports, docks, wharves, warehouses, ships, sailors, merchants, and financiers that we associate with a burgeoning London and Liverpool all stemmed from the slave-driven sugar trade, which was much more profitable than the troubling United States had been. The Revolutions in America and France "forced Ireland to change from uncomfortable colony into a component part of the British Isles". The transformation from "problem to partner" took place in Dublin. And, it is the construction of Georgian Dublin, well-planned, thorough and grand, at the height of the Protestant Ascendancy in the late 18th century, that tied the city to the Empire. In 1800, Ireland became part of the UK, no longer a separate kingdom or colony, but an integral part of the mother country. The Irish joined the Scots as foot soldiers of the Empire.
"Much more than Boston, fetid Bridgetown or familiar Dublin, the British fell in love with Cape Town." It was the axis of the Empire's pivot to the east. Its purpose was to help secure British domination of India and ensure the demise of the French colonial competition. The British took the Cape in 1795 from the Dutch for a very simple strategic reason: revolutionary France had invaded Holland. As a crossroads, cape Town was an extraordinarily diverse city. Muslims, Catholics, Hindus, and every branch of Protestantism worshipped and lived side by side. No race was predominant. It connected east and west and it was from the Cape, in 1798, that Richard Wellesley, older brother of the future Duke of Wellington and Governor-General of India set sail for Calcutta. A generation earlier, in 1773, Parliament began the six-decade process of first diminishing and later eliminating the East India Company's monopoly, and began to exert control through the new office of the Governor-General. The Raj would be headquartered in Calcutta until its early-twentieth century removal to New Delhi. Anxious about French influences, Wellesley undertook the "establishment of dominion over the Indian subcontinent and witnessed the beginnings of the projection of British military and maritime power into the Middle East and south-east Asia." He built up Calcutta, which proved to be a springboard for next leap east, to China. By the mid-19th century, religion as a prime motivator had been long replaced by mercantile aggrandizement. The move into China was driven by the desire to peddle opium, not Anglicanism. "Hong Kong would be the resplendent if uneasy monument to the global reach of the British Empire and to British imperialism at the height of its ideological self-confidence." Hong Kong and the chant of free trade were the vise with which the British opened up the Middle Kingdom.
"A second revolution of rail and steam was rolling across the Empire ........industry and mass production would change the function of imperial cities.........the dirty, smoggy city of Bombay would come to take the colonial mantle from the Fragrant Harbor of Hong Kong." It was a city in a hurry, a city focused on making money and believed "to embody the Victorian spirit of progress." "In Bombay the British Empire would build a monument to its own modernity." And the monument that rose the highest was the Victoria Terminus, a train station to rival any in Europe, still in use and featured in 'Slumdog Millionaire".
Melbourne is cited as a city that embraced a concept of Empire based on race. The white colonies of Canada, New Zealand and Australia viewed their relationship with Britain as a partnership amongst the Anglo-Saxon tribe. In New Delhi, the Empire peaked and it is where the Raj ended and the sun began to set. August 15, 1947 was Independence Day in India - perhaps it was best that Churchill had lost 10 Downing Street the year before. Hunt closes with Liverpool, once the second richest city of the Empire, the city that had commanded global trade since the 1700's and in 1981, so bereft of hope, that riots there led to the first use of CS gas by the police on mainland Britain. The end of empire meant the collapse of trade and catastrophe for Liverpool. A key driver of 19th century globalization become a 20th century victim, as trade moved to the eastern British cities, closer to the other EU countries. By the 1990's, "Liverpool was Britain's Detroit, a city that had died through its own irrelevance to the modern economy." Today, matters have come full circle - Chinese investment is regenerating the Merseyside.
This is a very good book that tells the story of the Empire in fascinating, insightful vignettes; a superb and creative way to depict the history of the Empire upon which the sun never set. I'm not convinced he makes his case about urbanism, but that certainly doesn't detract from the history told here. This is a great book for those who are intrigued by the British and all of their accomplishments (and failures) overseas.
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