The Transformation of the World (65 page)

Before the First World War, when Europe was at the height of its prestige, urban self-Westernization was not only a practical demand but also a political signal. Cairo offers a good illustration of this, even before the colonial period that began in 1882 with the British occupation. Within the space of a few years, between 1865 and 1869, an urban dualism arose in the pure form that one finds elsewhere at most in some French colonial capitals. After the French under Bonaparte had caused severe damage to the city in 1798 and 1800, Egypt's first modernizer, Pasha Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–48), did surprisingly little for his demographically stagnant capital. The preferred architectural style began to change slowly: glass windows came into use, the space inside houses was redivided, house numbers were introduced, and the pasha commissioned a French architect to build a “neo-Mamluk” monumental mosque, which he declared to be in the Egyptian national style. But otherwise the aspect of Old Cairo remained mostly unchanged under Muhammad Ali and his two successors.
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A
major break in the history of the city came only with the reign of Pasha Ismail (r. 1863–79, after 1867 with the viceregal title of khedive), who dreamed “the dream of Westernization.”
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Between the river and the labyrinthine old city, in whose narrow lanes there had been no room even for Muhammad Ali's coach, Ismail had a new city built in accordance with a geometric plan, brightly lit boulevards instead of dark streets accessible only on foot, green parks instead of swirling dust, fresh air instead of lingering odors, a drainage system instead of waste tanks and open sewers, the railroad instead of long-distance caravans. In Cairo, as in Istanbul around the same time, the introduction of dead-straight avenues with long lines of sight amounted to an aesthetic revolution.

In 1867 the world's fair in Paris convinced the khedive of the advantages of European-style city planning, and he let himself be guided by the master of the redesign of Paris, Baron Haussmann. Upon his return he sent his minister for public works, the capable and energetic Ali Pasha Mubarak, on a study tour to the French capital. The opening of the Suez Canal, planned for 1869, became the focus of hectic building activity in Cairo, which was expected to gleam forth as the modern pearl of the East. The khedive spared no expense for the construction of a theater, an opera house, city parks, a new palace for himself, and the first two bridges over the Nile.
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That all this helped to bankrupt the Egyptian state was another story. In part Ismail had a tactical goal: to demonstrate that Egypt was determined to modernize and to gain entry to the magical circle of Europe. In part he was deeply convinced of the superiority of the modern world that he saw taking shape north of the Mediterranean. City planning seemed to him the ideal instrument to achieve modernity and to make it perceptible at a symbolic level. Ismail did not spare the Old City and—in a decision that would have been unthinkable under Muhammad Ali—had some straight roads driven through it. He understood that it was essential to improve sanitary conditions in all parts of the city, but the advances made in this respect—installations to provide a supply of drinking water, and a conduit system—were by their nature scarcely visible in the cityscape.
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The stark contrast between the old and the new city was scarcely softened as a result.
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The British colonial period after 1882 took over the basic structures of Ismail's and Ali Pasha Mubarak's Cairo and added only a few things that were new, above all a concern for the preservation and even fanciful conjuring up of “medieval” or “Mamluk” elements of the city. “Colonial” Cairo was the creation of an Egyptian ruler who believed in progress and who attempted (in the long run unsuccessfully) not to become a politically dependent client of the Great Powers.

Similar stories of self-Westernization might be told about other cities in Asia and North Africa, such as
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 Beirut—unlike Cairo, a new city—which became a showcase of Ottoman modernity unencumbered by tradition, a bourgeois mirror to the admired Marseille across the sea;

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Istanbul, less violent but also more thorough than Cairo in adapting European city forms, in a way that avoided crass dualism and took infrastructural improvements more seriously;

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 Tokyo, where, by 1880, centrifugal forces had made parts of old Edo look like suburbs of Chicago or Melbourne and generally created an architecturally ugly appearance, while at the same time helping a self-confident neo-traditionalism to assert itself in the conduct of everyday life; or Seoul, opened up very late (1876) and formally colonized only in 1910, which in the intervening period remodeled itself as a capital city in the international-Western architectural language of the time.

The story of Hankou sounds different again.

Noncolonial Dynamism: Hankou

The opening of more and more links to global trade networks gave a major advantage to coastal areas. Almost the whole of Australia's urban development was ocean oriented, and in noncolonial countries with an old city system (e.g., China or Morocco) the demographic, economic, and political center of gravity shifted from the interior to the coast.
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Shanghai and Hong Kong, Casablanca and Rabat profited from this spatial shift, but inland cities also successfully linked into a dynamic in which world market forces combined with domestic trade flows. Had such economic centers been situated in the colonies, they would have been described without hesitation as “typically colonial”—which they were only in the sense that they counteracted the long-term trend toward a structural disparity between more dynamic (“developed,” “Western”) and more static (“backward,” “Oriental”) economic environments.

Cities of this type could be of different sizes and exist at various levels of city systems. One example was Kano in the Sahel region, the metropolis of the North Nigerian Sokoto caliphate. Hugh Clapperton visited the area in 1824–26, and the German traveler Heinrich Barth (on a British assignment) in 1851 and 1854. Both men saw an imposing walled city, which at the height of the spring caravan season in the Sahara had 60,000 to 80,000 people living in it at any one time. On the eve of the British intervention of 1894 it held approximately 100,000 inhabitants, one-half of them slaves. Kano was a dynamic economic center, with an efficient craft sector and a large catchment area for trading operations. Leather goods were exported to North Africa, textile material and tailored cloth to western Sudan. Cotton, tobacco, and indigo thrived in the surrounding area, much of it also being sent abroad. The slave trade remained important; slaves served as soldiers or worked in production. As a base for jihads, Kano had control of its own slave supply. It was a city that had grasped its economic opportunities, the most important of a number of commercial hubs in the Sahel.
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The location of Hankou, today part of the triple city of Wuhan, is an economic geographer's dream: at the center of a densely populated and fertile countryside,
with a system of waterways leading via the Yangtze in all directions, including to Shanghai and overseas.
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Unlike Hong Kong on the southern coast, which the British slowly developed into a major port from 1842 onward, Hankou in the late nineteenth century was an inland center with overseas connections, not an entrepôt and organizational center with relatively weak land links.
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Jesuits already described Hankou in the eighteenth century as one of the liveliest cities of the empire, and a Chinese merchants' handbook called it the most important transshipment center in the country.
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Hankou was a huge city, its population at least one million shortly after 1850—before the devastation of the Taiping Revolution. Indeed, it was one of the largest cities in the world, in the same league as London, of which it reminded many travelers on account of its high-density housing. Its growth had not resulted from any foreign presence or any links with the world market. In 1861 it was declared a treaty port. The British and French at once established small concessions, in which Chinese were accepted only as domestics, and starting in 1895 the Germans, Russians, and Japanese followed suit. Immediately after its “opening,” Hankou attracted foreign consuls, merchants, and missionaries. This sudden appearance of Europeans, the palatial mansions they built for themselves, and the political demands they made with the backing of gunboats on the Yangtze, marked a dramatic change in the history of the city.

But none of this made Hankou “colonial” in character. The concessions did not dominate the inner city in the way that they did in Shanghai already at that time; the largest of them, the British Concession, had just 110 resident foreigners in 1870. A truly “European city” did not rise up as in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cairo, or Hanoi. Above all, Hankou's extensive trade did not fall under the hegemony of foreign interests; its economic rationale was not transformed, in accordance with imperialist trends, from that of a “national” trading city into a vacuum pump for European and North American capitalism. As William T. Rowe has shown in a masterful analysis, Hankou before 1861 had been anything but the “Oriental city” familiar from Western sociology: static, geometrically designed, subject to an overbearing municipal authority. Nor, after 1861, was it a typical “colonial city.” Rowe avoids choosing a label. His account describes a quite “bourgeois” urban world, in which a highly differentiated and specialized merchant class developed existing trade networks and branched out into new lines of business. Guilds—which, in the light of Rowe's urban history, should no longer be tagged “premodern”—adapted flexibly to changing circumstances, making tried-and-tested credit institutions more effective instead of discarding them in favor of Western-style banks. Hankou society accepted newcomers, becoming more pluralist and, under the leadership of local notables, developing into a community in which the lower orders, by no means always deferential, found a place for themselves. After the end of the Taiping terror, which came to the city from outside, massive reconstruction work became necessary and was carried out. The people of Hankou did not allow themselves to be passively colonized. Only the onset of industrialization in the 1890s changed the social
climate and structures of the city. Some of the early factories were founded by foreigners, but the larger ones—such as the vast, technologically modern iron and steelworks at Hanyang—had their origin in Chinese initiative. Early industrial Hankou did not become a colonial city either. The great urban center of the Middle Yangtze Valley is a particularly good illustration of the fact that not every contact with the world market leads a weak economy into colonial dependence.

The first
post
colonial cities also emerged in the nineteenth century: cities that, turning away more sharply than those of the young United States from their colonial past, attempted in some sense to “reinvent” themselves. Mexico City was in such a situation. Here the first step in decolonization went back to 1810 when, even before the gaining of formal independence, the so-called Indian republic—above all, the fiscal exactions of the “Indian Tribute”—was abolished. But the belt of corn-growing Indian villages around the city remained part of the landscape for a number of decades, after which Indian land fell increasingly into the hands of private speculators. In November 1812, under the terms of the Constitution of Cadiz, Mexicans were called upon to vote for the first time in local elections, and from April 1813 on—still eight years before independence—Mexico City was governed by an elected council that consisted only of
Americanos
and included a number of Indian notables. This was a veritable anticolonial revolution; people wanted to wipe out the last traces of the ancien régime. The actual changes, however, were less dramatic than those envisaged in the program. Mexico City did not play a major role in the liberation movement, and in the new republican state it lost the aura and power it had enjoyed in colonial times. The cityscape remained essentially unaltered until the middle of the century. In particular, since Catholicism retained its position as the state religion, the city continued to resemble a huge cloister; it counted seven monasteries and twenty-one nunneries in 1850. Mexico City remained “Baroque,” with state and church firmly yoked together. Only in the second half of the century did it undergo major changes.
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Imperial Cities

Ultimately, the colonial city was the counterpart to the imperial city, to the ruling metropolis that was the source of the colonizer's power. The imperial city is easily defined: it is a political command center, a collection point for information, an economically parasitic beneficiary of asymmetrical relations with its various peripheries, and a showplace for emblems of the dominant ideology. The Rome of Augustus and of the two centuries that followed was such an imperial city in its pure form, as were Lisbon and Istanbul in the sixteenth century and Vienna in the nineteenth. In modern times, the various criteria are otherwise not easy to match up. The cityscape of Berlin bears many traces of its past as a colonial metropolis (between 1884 and 1914), but economically Berlin never had an appreciable dependence on Germany's comparatively meager colonial empire in Africa, China, and the South Pacific. Conversely, the prosperity of the
Netherlands in the nineteenth century would have been unimaginable without the exploitation of Indonesia. This rather major dependence was hardly discernible to the casual visitor; only weak attempts were made to fit Amsterdam to the phenotype of an imperial city. The Royal Museum of the Tropics is today the most visible reminder of erstwhile colonial luxury. Rome, by contrast, whose colonial empire was rather insignificant, adorned itself after 1870 with imperial monuments—no problem, in view of the stage scenery inherited from the Caesars.
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In Paris too, the conditions were favorable. The overseas colonialism of the Second Empire and the Third Republic could insert itself into the imperial cityscape shaped by Napoleon I. Marseille played the role of a second imperial city, rather as Seville had done in relation to Madrid. Glasgow, in many respects the center of a distinctively Scottish empire, convinced itself that it was “the second city of the Empire,” even if that was not immediately obvious to visitors.