The Transformation of the World (63 page)

Overseas trade was an important engine of urbanization, not only in the colonies but also in Europe. In 1850, 40 percent of cities with a population above 100,000 were ports; it was not until the mid-twentieth century that they lost their first place to industrial centers.
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In some European countries, urbanization was essentially a coastal phenomenon: in Spain all the large cities (Barcelona, Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Valencia—though not Madrid) lay on or near the sea, and the same was true of the Netherlands and Norway. Even in France, some of the great provincial centers (Bordeaux, Marseille, Nantes, Rouen) were on or near the coast. The industrial structure of port cities, except the very largest, was different from that of inland population centers. Typical port industries were cereal or cooking-oil processing, sugar refining, fish packing, coffee roasting, and (later) petroleum refining; heavy industry, or heavier branches of light industry, rarely entered the picture. In cities such as New York and Hamburg, it was not the industrial districts but the ports that were the main zones of innovation.
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Only in fairly rare cases did a port city later branch out into industry on a large scale: Genoa, whose development at the end of the century owed more to industry than to foreign trade, was one example, as were Barcelona and (after the First World War) Shanghai.

Port cities were often governed by small oligarchies of merchants, bankers, and shipowners, a
grande bourgeoisie
that created many a chamber of commerce to represent its interests and to ensure social exclusiveness. This was no different in Rotterdam or Bremen than in Shanghai or Izmir. Landowners had less political influence than in large cities inland. However, the oligarchies were not always united among themselves: tensions could arise between commercial and industrial interests, or between supporters and opponents of free trade. In general, the dominant ideology of the commercial capitalist oligarchies involved a preference for the night-watchman state, one that intervened little and was satisfied with low taxes; the highest priority was to ensure the smooth flow of trade. Merchants tended to regard city planning with skepticism and to recoil from investment in infrastructure other than port facilities. Such cities seldom came up with administrative innovations, nor were they often in the vanguard of measures to improve public hygiene. Longer than elsewhere, they relied more on paternalist benevolence and ad hoc philanthropy than on the regular provision
of social support. Sharp class conflicts were therefore a characteristic result of the polarized structure of port cities such as Liverpool and Genoa; the middle classes were less important than in strongly industrial inland cities such as Birmingham, Berlin, and Turin.

6 Colonial Cities, Treaty Ports, Imperial Metropolises

Is it meaningful to refer to port cities or administrative centers in the colonies as “colonial cities”?
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At the end of the nineteenth century, such a large part of the earth was under colonial rule that it seems reasonable to assume that the “colonial city” was a typical form of the age. Right from the start the Spanish had exported Iberian city forms to the New World, though not always the same standard pattern. Then at the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish-American colonial city was transferred to the Philippines: Manila differed in no way—except for the presence of Chinese—from a city in Mexico. Unique among the bridgeheads of early European expansion in Asia, it was not simply a trading port but also a center of secular and religious control.
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On a more modest scale, the Dutch—also from a highly urbanized background—followed the example of the Spanish in Asia, or at least in the city of Batavia, which they founded in 1619 with visible success.

Calcutta and Hanoi

Once the British were firmly in the saddle in India, they made of their main base, Calcutta, a city of palaces. From 1798 on, after more than four decades in which the East India Company had exercised supreme political authority, the Bengali capital mutated into a splendid neoclassical ensemble almost unrivaled anywhere in the world. The function of the city did not change fundamentally. What it had lacked, despite brisk construction activity since the 1760s, had been a fitting architectural garb. At the core of the new design was the gigantic New Government House, which, unlike its modest predecessors, no longer drew sneers from critical Indians or envious Frenchmen. The new governor's residence, inaugurated in 1803, outshone every dwelling place or official seat available to English monarchs. They also erected a whole new series of public buildings (city hall, law courts, customs office, etc.), churches, and private villas belonging to East India Company officials or merchants—and high above them all towered the watchful Fort William.
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The Calcutta of porticoes and Doric colonnades did not simply transplant an English city to India. It was the stone utopia of a new Imperial Rome, conceived less as a functioning city than as a power landscape in which Indians, too, were meant to find their place. Architecturally, it is not difficult to follow the colonial traces of Europe around the globe, but they do not often appear as compactly and forcefully as they do in Calcutta. Few other colonies were loaded with such symbolic weight. Few were so rich and so easily exploitable that colonial
splendor could be funded locally (colonies, after all, were not supposed to become loss-making businesses, unless this was unavoidable for reasons of international prestige). A set of European-style buildings, then, did not add up to a fully self-contained colonial cityscape. The minimum that even the poorest colonial capital required was a governor's palace, an army barracks, and a church; a hospital and a couple of villas for European officials and merchants completed the core. Whether whole districts sprang up in the European style depended on the size of the foreign presence in the city.

The will to plan and fund a whole new model city was quite exceptional. Dakar, founded in 1857 and later rising to be the capital for the whole of French West Africa, is a particularly impressive example.
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Dublin may be thought of as a special case: not a planned colonial cityscape, but an opulent symbolic field with an imperial character. The capital of Ireland was lavishly provided with statues of English kings and queens, who expressed London's will to rule the country and served as the departure point for Protestant ceremonial occasions. But since the British never had the municipal government of Dublin fully under their control, national memorial sites were gradually established as symbols of resistance in opposition to the imperial monuments.
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Early-twentieth-century Hanoi was a fully developed colonial metropolis, at once center of the protectorate of Tonkin and, since 1902, capital of the Indochinese Union (comprising the three French
pays
of Vietnam plus Cambodia and Laos). Vietnam had posed thorny problems of imperial control right from the beginning, and the France of the Third Republic felt a special need to impress the natives and to convince the world of its colonizing abilities. Hanoi, the main city in Tonkin and since 1802 no longer the seat of the Vietnamese emperor, came under de facto French control in 1889 and immediately began to turn into a French city. The city walls and, also the Vauban-style citadel dating from early in the century were pulled down; new streets and boulevards were laid in a grid pattern and provided with a paved surface. Government buildings and an ugly cathedral rose up alongside a railroad station, an opera house (a smaller version of the Garnier Opera in Paris), a
lycée
, a prison, a technically remarkable bridge over the Red River, monasteries and convents, numerous official buildings, glass-domed department stores in the Parisian style, villas for top bureaucrats and merchants (two hundred individually designed luxury houses by the end of the colonial period), and standardized suburban dwellings for lower-ranking French personnel. The crassest monuments of colonialism, the governor's palace and the cathedral, were erected with brutal symbolism on the sites left vacant by demolished pagodas and Confucian examination halls. Whereas the British in Calcutta built their colonial city
beside
the indigenous old town, the French colonial authorities put theirs in its place. Streets and squares were named after “heroes” of the French conquest or great historical or contemporary Frenchmen.

The architectural style of this early colonial period made no concessions to Asian forms; indeed, settlers in Saigon set themselves quite consciously against
such references. The glitter of France was meant to radiate its civilizing effect in all its original brightness. Corinthian, neo-Gothic, early Baroque: everything was jumbled together. British India did not shrink from historical allusions either, but at least—as in Victoria Station in Bombay—its designers dared to combine English, French, or Venetian Gothic with elements of what counted as the “Indo-Saracenic” style.
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Only after the turn of the century was there growing discontent in Vietnam and Paris with the bombast of the nineties. Scholars discovered a politically less explosive “old” Indochina behind the Sino-Vietnamese traditions, and after the First World War some art deco designs were also introduced in Hanoi.
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Politically too, Europeanization was carried as far as it was possible to go. Hanoi with its up to four thousand (1908) French residents was endowed, like a good old French provincial capital, with a mayor, a city council, a budget, and heated factional struggles.
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The main difference with Tours or Lyons was that although locally born people, as well as non-European immigrants from China or India, enjoyed some legal protection and a degree of informal participation (rich Chinese merchants even belonged to the chamber of commerce), they had no say when it came to politics.

The Ideal Type of a “Colonial City”

Hanoi looked more amazingly European than anywhere else in the colonies, and so it might be taken as the basis for the ideal type of a “modern” (as opposed to early modern) colonial city. Like the global city of the late twentieth century, the colonial city has as its most general characteristic a primary orientation to the outside world. Its other features are
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▪
 a monopoly of political, military, and police control in the hands of rulers from abroad whose legitimacy derives solely from conquest;

▪
 exclusion of the indigenous population, even its elite, from decisions about how the local authorities should regulate the life of the city;

▪
 the introduction from Europe of secular or religious architecture, usually in the latest or next to latest style, or in one reflecting the supposedly “national” style of the colony in question;

▪
 spatial dualism and horizontal segregation between a district for foreigners, lavishly and healthily designed in accordance with European principles, and a halfheartedly modernized (at best) “native city” that was regarded as backward;

▪
 a fragmented urban society, with rigid compartmentalization along racial lines, and the relegation of locally born people to badly paid and dependent service jobs; and

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 an orientation to the opening up, reshaping, and exploitation of the hinterland, in accordance with foreign interests and the requirements of international markets.

Such a list of distinct features has the advantage of avoiding hasty labels: the colonial city cannot be defined
only
in terms of its architecture or its economic function. On the other hand, the list mixes together form and function, for example; and the sum of the characteristics yields such a narrow definition that few cases are likely to correspond to it in the real world. Hanoi, for instance, was not unimportant economically, but it was neither a port city nor a typical colonial “vacuum pump” for the extraction of resources. Its functions can be adequately described only in the context of a
city system
, which in the case of Indochina would also have to include the port city of Haiphong and the southern metropolis of Saigon, as well as Hong Kong, Batavia, and ultimately Marseille or Nantes.

As an ideal type, the “colonial city” may help to bring the observed reality into sharper focus and to draw out its distinctive characteristics; it therefore also rules out a number of things in advance. If a colonial city is understood as a place of ongoing contact between different cultures,
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then all large multicultural ports had a colonial element, whether or not they were in the colonies, London, New Orleans, Istanbul, or Shanghai among them. All had plural social structures. That characteristic alone would therefore not be sufficiently specific. If, on the other hand, “colonial city” is understood entirely politically, so that its decisive criterion is incapacitation of the local elite by an autocratic ruling apparatus implanted from outside, then Warsaw (as part of the Tsarist Empire) would fulfill that condition. At the end of the nineteenth century, a city that was not allowed to become the capital of a Polish national state had a permanent garrison of 40,000 Russian soldiers. An intimidating citadel towered over the populace, cossacks patrolled the streets, and ultimate authority lay with a Russian police chief answerable directly to Moscow. By comparison, a “normal” European metropolis such as Vienna had a regular garrison of 15,000 troops, mostly of local origin.
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Many characteristics of a colonial city need to be defined dynamically, not in a “binary” grid of presence and absence. Some historians are especially inclined to detect strict segregation or “urban apartheid,” while others have a sharper eye for “hybridity” and admire the “cosmopolitanism” of many large colonial cities. But in between there are many different gradations. The social composition of colonial cities was marked by shades, transitions, and overlapping, against the background of a dichotomy between colonizer and colonized that operated
in principle
but did not take effect in each and every sphere of life. Social and ethnic hierarchies were superimposed on one another in complex ways. Even at the high-water mark of racist thinking, the solidarity of skin color and nationality by no means universally cancelled the solidarity of class. Wealthy Indian merchants or Malayan aristocrats were as a rule barred from British clubs in the large colonial cities, but so were “poor whites.” In case of doubt, the social distance between a British official in the Indian Civil Service and the white inmate of a workhouse in India was greater than the ethnic distance between the same official and a prosperous, well-educated Indian lawyer—unless the relationship
was clouded by politics (as it came to be after the First World War). The typical “colonial city” society was not organized simply in accordance with a two-class or two-race stratification.