The Transformation of the World (71 page)

The New Delhi project was unique, and so it would remain. The modernism that became the universal language of architecture in the twentieth century had originated on the other side of the world, in the 1880s, when the first skyscrapers expressing the new style in their external appearance grew upward in Chicago. The Monadnock Building Complex (1889–93) is perhaps the first building that an observer spontaneously ascribes to a new era in architecture.
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Until the 1910s it was not technically possible to build skyscrapers with more than fifty stories. For a long time, this modernism remained American: the fact that planners and architects increasingly formed a kind of international—studying one another's work, making trips, and exchanging experiences—or the fact that stylistic borrowing and technology transfers became perfectly normal did not at all imply a global homogenization of tastes. The most spectacular new buildings in nineteenth-century Madrid were huge bullfighting arenas—not necessarily an export hit.
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Europeans did not eagerly adopt the skyscraper, any more than they did the largely American vision of suburbia. City planners in the Old World fought against the disproportionate height and the obstruction of the view of churches and public buildings.
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The nineteenth century was one of the most important in the multimillennial history of the city as a material structure and a way of life. From the vantage point of 1900, even more so from that of the 1920s, it appeared as the founding age of urban modernism. The backward continuities with the early modern period are weaker than the forward ones with the twentieth century. Until the growth of “megacities” and the annihilation of distance by telecommunications and information technology, all the features of contemporary urbanism originated in the nineteenth century. Even the automobile age was looming on the horizon, if not yet the tyranny of the car over
all
cities in the world.

What remains of the neat cultural types that the old urban sociology, but also today's urban geography, have been so fond of demarcating? Even for the premodern period, the differences among “European,” “Chinese,” and “Islamic” cities have become less sharp and vivid for the contemporary student of global urban history; functional similarities appear at least as clearly as cultural specificities. But it would be superficial to go to the other extreme of seeing only crossovers and hybridity.
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Many tendencies spread worldwide, supported by Europe's demographic, military, and economic expansion, without being by-products of imperialism and colonialism. Examination of cities in noncolonized countries outside Europe (Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Ottoman Empire) has repeatedly demonstrated this. Designs for the city of the future were increasingly elaborated in a broad Atlantic, Mediterranean, Pacific, or Eurasian spatial context. The “colonial city” immediately evaporates as a sharply defined type; the bald dichotomy of “Western” and “Eastern” is unsustainable.

Thus, within the European and neo-European West, completely new cityscapes appeared in North America and Australia, not at all mere reproductions of Old World models. There was no direct European inspiration for the Chicago or Los Angeles of 1900. Types such as the “American” or “Australian” city are also difficult to construct, since cross connections leap to the eye in a global historical perspective. Melbourne was sparsely built over a wide area, like the cities of the American West Coast, whereas Sydney was dense and compact, like New York, Philadelphia, and the big cities of Europe.
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The modernization of urban infrastructure was a worldwide process, which required political will and a high degree of administrative capability, money, and technologies, and also the agency of philanthropic institutions as well as profit-oriented private interests. There were temporal disparities, but the process was generally complete by the 1930s in the major metropolises. In China, for example, then a very poor country with a weak state, the sanitization and physical development of cities was not confined to the cosmopolitan showcase of Shanghai. After 1900 urban modernization was also found deep in the interior, far from any strong foreign influence, where upper classes at the provincial or municipal level often encouraged and accomplished projects out of nationalist motives.
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New construction materials, techniques, and organization did not, however, automatically engender a corresponding change in urban society. A city is both a distinctive social cosmos and a mirror of the wider society around it. In various settings, therefore, specific mechanisms and institutions of social integration were at work. Thus, Western models of social stratification fail to uncover the logic of cities in the Islamic Middle East if we do not also recognize the tremendously important functions of religious foundations (
waqf
) as centers of political authority, religious and secular scholarship, exchange, and spirituality. They had a stabilizing effect, protecting property and defining its significance in space; they offered mechanisms for mediation between individual or private-corporate interests and the general requirements of urban society.
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Similar examples may be found all over the world. Special societal institutions, often going back many centuries, resisted external adaptive pressure and remained woven into the social fabric of a fast-changing city.

CHAPTER VII

 

Frontiers

Subjugation of Space and Challenges to Nomadic Life

1 Invasions and Frontier Processes

In the nineteenth century, the opposite extreme of “city” is no longer “country,” the realm of farming, but rather “frontier”: the moving boundary of resource development. It advances into spaces that are rarely as empty as the agents of expansion talk themselves and others into believing. For those who see the frontier approaching them, it is the spearhead of an invasion; it will leave little as it was before. People flow into the city and to the frontier; these are the two great magnets for nineteenth-century migration. As spaces of boundless possibility, they attract migrants like nothing else in the age. The city and the frontier share a permeability and malleability of social conditions. Those who
have
nothing but are
capable
of something can achieve it here. The opportunities are greater, but so are the risks. At the frontier, the cards are reshuffled to produce winners and losers.

In relation to the city, the frontier is “periphery.” It is in the city that frontier rule is ultimately organized, there that the weapons and instruments for its subjugation are literally forged. If cities are founded at the frontier, then the pre-frontier area moves farther out; newly established trading posts become the bases for further expansion. But the frontier is not a passive periphery. It brings forth special interests, identities, ideals, values, and character types interact with the core. The city can see its counterpart in the periphery. To a patrician from Boston, backwoodsmen in log cabins were scarcely less savage and exotic than Indian tribal warriors. The societies that take shape in frontier areas live within wider and widening contexts. Sometimes they break free; sometimes they succumb to the pressure of the city or to the consequences of their own exhaustion.

Land Acquisition and Resource Use

Archaeological and historical records are filled with processes of colonial land acquisition, in which communities open up new areas as a source of livelihood. The nineteenth century brought such tendencies to a climax but, in a sense, also
to an end. In no previous age had so much land been used for agriculture. This expansion was a result of demographic growth in many parts of the world. It is true that the total population would increase even faster in the twentieth century, but the
extensive
use of resources would not grow at the same speed; the twentieth century as a whole is characterized by more
intensive
exploitation of existing potential (which by definition consumes less additional space). Destruction of tropical rainforest and overfishing of the oceans do, however, perpetuate the earlier pattern of extensive exploitation, in an age that in other respects has reached new heights of intensive development as a result of nanotechnology or real-time communications.

In nineteenth-century Europe, especially outside Russia, colonial landgrabs on a large scale became a rarity; it mainly took the form of settlement elsewhere in the world. Here all the dramas of European history seemed to repeat themselves while, at the same time, comparable processes were unleashed by Chinese and by peoples in tropical Africa. Migratory movements to the Burmese “rice frontier,” or to the “plantation frontier” in other parts of Southeast Asia, were the result of new export opportunities in international markets. Land-grabbing settlement was associated with highly diverse experiences, which find their reflection in historical writing. On the one hand, active settlers drove into the “wilderness” on their heroic wagon treks, claiming “ownerless” land for themselves and their livestock and introducing the appurtenances of “civilization.” The older historiography tended to glorify these pioneering deeds, depicting them as contributions both to modern nationhood and to the progress of humanity as a whole. Few authors put themselves in the place of the peoples who had lived for centuries or even millennia in the supposed “wilderness.” James Fenimore Cooper, a patrician's son whose family occupied frontier land in New York State, already evoked the tragedy of the Indians in his
Leatherstocking Tales
, a series of novels published between 1824 and 1841 and soon widely read in Europe. But it was only in the early twentieth century that this bleak vision gained occasional entry into the work of American historians.
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After the Second World War and especially with the onset of decolonization, when doubts emerged about the white man's role in spreading good in the world, historians began to take an interest in ethnology and concerned themselves with the fate of the victims of colonial expansion; both academia and the wider public became aware of the injustices done to indigenous peoples in the Americas or Australasia, and the heroic pioneers of old became brutal and cynical imperialists.
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Then, in a third stage, the one we are still in today, this black-and-white picture was refined into various shades of grey. Historians discovered what the American historian Richard White has famously called “the middle ground,” that is, spaces of long-term contact in which the roles of perpetrator and victim were not always clear-cut, and in which negotiated compromises, temporary equilibria, and intertwined economic interests—sometimes also cultural or biological “hybridity”—developed between “natives” and “newcomers.”
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Regional
variations have also come in for closer scrutiny; the view on frontiers has become pluralized and polycentric; the role of “third parties” in frontier expansion—that of the Chinese, for example, in the American Northwest—has been given as much attention as the fact that many (though not all) of these processes were driven by families and not by vigorous males on their own. There were cowgirls alongside the cowboys.
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An especially rich literature now exists on the mythology of colonization and its representation in the media, from early illustrated travel reports to Hollywood Westerns.

For all the nuances, it remains of fundamental importance that the winners and losers of colonial landgrabs can be easily distinguished from each other. Although some non-European peoples, such as the Maoris in New Zealand, put up more successful resistance than others, the global offensive against tribal ways of life led almost everywhere to the defeat of the indigenous population. Whole societies lost their traditional sources of livelihood without being offered a place in the new order of their homeland. Those who escaped merciless persecution were subjected to “civilizing” procedures that involved complete devaluation of the traditional native culture. In this sense, the nineteenth century already witnessed the
tristes tropiques
about which Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote so poignantly in 1955. The massive assaults on those whom Europeans and North Americans regarded as “primitive peoples” left even deeper traces than the subjugation—at first sight more dramatic—of those non-Europeans who might at least become economically useful in systems of colonial exploitation. Sir Christopher Bayly has identified this as one of the key processes of nineteenth-century world history and has justly discussed it in close conjunction with ecological depredation.
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Colonial rule formally came to an end in the third quarter of the twentieth century. But almost nowhere was there a change in the subordinate position of “ethnic minorities” who had once been masters in their own land. The process of their subordination was quite swift. In the eighteenth century there were still semi-stable areas of “middle ground” in many parts of the world. But such zones of precarious coexistence were unable to survive in the second half of the nineteenth century. Only with the general delegitimation of colonial rule and racism after 1945 was fresh thought given to original injustice, “aboriginal rights,” and the question of reparations, including compensation for slavery and the slave trade. The beginnings of recognition by the outside world also created a new scope for the affected minorities to build an identity. The fundamental marginalization of their way of life, however, is tragically irreversible and irreparable.

Frederick Jackson Turner and the Consequences

Land-grabbing colonization is one of the ways in which empires come into being. The legionnaire does not always have to go first; often the great invasion begins with the merchant, settler, or missionary. In many cases, however, it is a nation-state itself that “fills” a predefined territory. There is something that resembles inner frontiers and internal colonization. The most striking and
generally successful example of pioneer development was the European settlement of North America from the Atlantic coast westward, which the older American historical tradition celebrated as “the winning of the West” (Theodore Roosevelt). The name for this gigantic process is itself of American origin. The young Frederick Jackson Turner coined it in 1893 in a lecture that is still probably the most influential text to have been written by an American historian.
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Turner spoke of a “frontier” that had been driven ever farther from east to west until it reached a state of “closure.” Here civilization and barbarism met each other in an asymmetrical distribution of power and historical right; the efforts of the pioneers had formed a special national character; the peculiar egalitarianism of American democracy had its roots in the common experience of life in the forests and prairies of the West. “Frontier” was thus the keyword that made possible a new grand narrative of US national history, and that would later be generalized into a category applicable to other settings.
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