Rise and fall of British empire viewed through its cities

An insightful new book considers 10 cities that helped make Britain great.

Melbourne was of great significance to the empire in the 1880s.

AS contemporary Britain becomes more disjunctive from its older ethos — and the days when it ruled one-quarter of the globe — books continue to appear reinterpreting the experience of empire. But few have the originality of this one.

Tristram Hunt, a British Labour MP, histor­ian and author, has taken 10 representative cities and told the story of imperial rise and decline through them. The account of each place is centred on a particular episode, so that the story is steadily advanced through a cycle ­­­of cities.

He opens with Boston, presenting it in a way we are not used to, as a very British city across the seas — until antagonised by the heavy-handedness of England. A little later it is Dublin’s turn, the Georgian fabric of the city related to the period when the British first relaxed their control of Ireland — fearing another America — only to tighten it again during the Napoleonic Wars.

Next to Cape Town and its occupation (twice) by British forces during the wars against the French. The second time they stayed. When it came to appreciating the Cape’s strategic importance in controlling the route to India, Whitehall had been a slow learner.

Seamlessly the book then moves on to Calcutta itself, examining the establishment of British rule there by the East India Company. As with most of the places discussed, the empire made this city as much as the other way round: the magnificence of British-founded Calcutta led to it being referred to as ‘‘the city ­of palaces’’.

Hunt also brings out the ballooning of British arrogance: the casting aside of training officials in Indian languages and culture, in Calcutta, in preference for training them at home. The imperial managers of the day were now instructed in the importance of free trade, transparent government, rational choice. Human nature was the same everywhere, it was believed, so the principles of Utilitarianism could and should be applied.

‘‘I fear,’’ said one old India hand, that some ‘‘will insist on making Anglo-Saxons of the ­Hindoos.’’

So where does Australia fit in this imperial progress? Sydney is mentioned only incidentally, but with good reason. It had no imperial moment. True, it is much older than the other major Australian cities — so that its town plan loosely resembles Calcutta’s, while a number of its streets are named after the ducal sons of ­George III.

But as the 19th century progressed, Sydney lost its lead. That passed for a time to Melbourne, which Donald Horne dubbed a jumped-up gold rush town.

Melbourne has a whole a chapter in this book, as one of the 10 cities — as it did as the only overseas metropolis in Asa Briggs’s famous book of 50 years ago, Victorian Cities. Here it is slipped in between Bombay of the cotton boom (and crash) and the building of that proto-Canberra, New Delhi.

Before it was brought up sharply by a crash of its own that climaxed in 1893, Melbourne was of particular importance to the empire: in the 1880s it was the prime destination of British investment overseas. The city siphoned the funds that led to infrastructural development, further settlement and mineral exploitation across Australia. As a consequence, it remained Australia’s financial capital for a century.

“Melbourne came to maturity,’’ Hunt explains, “‘as the greatest urban embodiment of a mid-Victorian belief in imperial solidarity, Anglo-Saxon brotherhood and civic pride.’’ Its interests complemented and harmonised with those of the mother country, particularly as the belief had arisen there that English racial strength might be more apparent in distant colonies than in Britain itself.

The project of uniting the empire in some form of imperial federation was a popular one; colonists rather liked to think of themselves as ‘‘Britannic’’. St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne was designed by a leading English architect, while Government House was modelled on Queen Victoria’s favourite residence.

Powered by the economic boom, Melbourne almost doubled its size in the single decade of the 1880s. It became a sprawling city of nearly half a million, linked by one the world’s biggest networks of cable trams. Hence the tag of a visiting British journalist, ‘‘Marvellous Melbourne’’: a marvel when contrasted with the lack of any sign of settlement only 50 years before.

The book shows how the suburban ideal took root in Melbourne but underestimates the rising hostility to it: the suburbs themselves are a shadowy presence. Nor does the author quite get — despite a number of frothy quotations about social activities — the frantic pace of daily life there. At the height of the land boom, properties would change hands four or five times before the original titleholder had been paid. It was a time, as Paul de Serville memorably put it, when Scotch Presbyterians were behaving like Latins.

Hunt is good on the subsequent inertness of Melbourne — on the way that it neither accepts its imperial legacy nor rejects it. Instead, it has preferred to take ‘‘Marvellous’’ as a more general endorsement. Just below the surface there remains its ‘‘unique mix of imperial bombast and gold-digger vulgarity’’ — the perfect recipe for producing a Barry Humphries.

The overseas investment Melbourne channelled, Hunt points out, was ultimately a massive diversion of resources, “beggaring British industry and so, in the long run, undermining national competitiveness’’.

Economic decline is brought home in the chapter on the last city, Liverpool. Like other homeland cities, ‘‘Britain’s Detroit’’ lost its economic focus and all sense of purpose, as was evident in the nine-day Toxteth riots of 1981. Its manufacturing had been built on colonial produce and on handling goods in transit. But Britain’s share of world exports dropped from 25 per cent to 8 per cent in the 20 years to 1970; Liverpool, having prospered on the transatlantic trade, was particularly badly affected. Geographical relegation followed Britain joining the European Economic Community.

Hunt sees a ray of hope for Liverpool — with a historian’s dispassionate eye. First funding from the EU came to the rescue: now it is China. The city has ‘‘twinned’’ with Shanghai; massive developments are planned, including a 60-storey Shanghai Tower.

‘‘After centuries of exporting our power abroad,’’ he notes, ‘‘Britain is now on the receiving end of Empire.’’

It is a stunning conclusion to this broad sweep across the British world. Ten Cities that Made an Empire is well-researched, vigorously written and punctuated by telling vignettes of how these places look today. The full list of the 10 cities is: Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi and Liverpool. There are, of course, several metropolises left out, since they are incidental to Hunt’s purpose: he is concerned only with colonial cities as the muscles of empire.

Montreal and Toronto are passed over: Canada as vanilla. More surprisingly, so is Johannesburg. Other places might have become foregrounded had Hunt’s focus been just the 20th century; in Australia, as it came out of empire, the role of Sydney has been paramount. In addition, the other major role the chosen cities took, of nurturing more independent-minded elites, is something to be explored further. But that is a subject for another book.

Jim Davidson is the author of A Three-Cornered Life, a prize-winning biography of historian Keith Hancock.

Ten Cities That Made an Empire

By Tristram Hunt

Allen Lane, 544pp, $49.99 (HB)