Stones of Empire

Tristram Hunt’s portraits of cities such as Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay bring to life the imperial mission

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

– Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

In 1911, speaking in the House of Lords after the King- Emperor had announced the transfer of the Capital from Calcutta to Delhi, Lord Curzon—India’s most celebrated and most vilified Viceroy—admitted to having “a very warm feeling for Calcutta myself. It has always seemed to me to be a worthy capital and expression of British rule in India. It is English built, English commerce has made it the second city in the Empire…” To Curzon, a Viceroy with an acute sense of imperial destiny, Delhi with its “mass of deserted ruins and graves” was a testimony to “the mutability of human greatness”. Curzon was right. The British Raj never got to enjoy New Delhi. Lutyens’ majestic creation became the happy hunting ground of a successor regime. As a city, Delhi grew and prospered. The same could hardly be said of the city the East India Company bequeathed to India.

In early-1985, India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, fresh from a spectacular election victory, visited Calcutta. Exasperated by unending accusations of wilful neglect, the young and somewhat impetuous inheritor snapped back that Calcutta was a “dying city”. Predictably, all hell broke loose, and for much of his remaining tenure Gandhi had to endure the angry taunts of emotional Bengalis for whom urban decay was the fountainhead of poetry and romance.

Lacking a sense of history, Gandhi’s choice of words seemed heartless and politically clumsy. In essence, he was pointing to an undeniable reality that was soon to become conventional wisdom after the great economic opening-up of India in 1991: that Calcutta had failed to manage the transition from the colonial to the modern economy.

Four years before Gandhi discovered decline on the mudflats of the River Hoogly, Michael Heseltine, a colourful British Conservative politician, spoke lyrically about Liverpool, another port city that had witnessed social unrest as a consequence of urban degeneration and decline. “The Mersey, its lifeblood, flowed as majestically as ever down from the hills. Its monumental Georgian and Victorian buildings, created with such pride and at such cost by the city’s fathers of a century and earlier, still dominated the skyline. The Liver Building, the epicentre of a trading system that had reached out to the four corners of the earth, stood defiant and from my perspective very alone. The port had serviced an empire and sourced a world trade.” Since then, he rued, “everything had gone wrong.”

Or had it?

In a book that should be read as much for its stylish narrative as for its majestic sweep across continents and centuries, Tristram Hunt—a man who has made a worthwhile switch from professional history-writing to professional politics— uses the tale of 10 cities to weave the story of an Empire that was forged as much by circumstances, even absent-mindedness, as by design.

The story of each of the 10 cities—most of which grew as a consequence of Empire—can of course be told in isolation. Indeed, their present-day residents are unlikely to be terribly enamoured by the awareness that their present hasn’t been shaped merely by their national past but through the criss- crossing linkages that made the British Empire more than an aggregate of overseas possessions. Indian historians—or at least the Indian history that is taught in India—often make a virtue of viewing the colonial past as being connected to an abstraction that goes by the name of ‘imperialism’. The great virtue of Hunt’s latest work and indeed many of the popular but no less scholarly histories that have hit the stands in the past decade (often as spin-offs of very watchable TV programmes) is that the British Empire is presented as an aggregation of riveting national histories—minus the theoretical mumbo-jumbo.

To qualify as proper history, it has been suggested by the more politically involved of India’s historians, a work must gain the acceptance of the scholarly community. By that logic, this book would probably fail the draconian Romila Thapar test, as would Niall Ferguson’s Empire.

For a start, its tone is not hectoring. Hunt doesn’t think that the main thrust of his study is to debunk the British Empire in its entirety and demand that the Queen and the British Prime Minister issue grovelling apologies for past misdemeanours and, where necessary, pay reparations. Hunt is not an apologist of Empire and doesn’t overlook the mismatch between Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ and the sordid realities of the slave trade, opium trade and man-made famines. He allows contemporary accounts to tell a story and replenishes those with relevant economic data.

Secondly, Hunt blends the rigours of historical research with the craft of good journalism to make history alive to the non-specialist reader. I have often been asked why histories by British writers (including on subjects Indian) make it to the Sunday Times bestseller lists while scholarly studies by Indian authors are to be found only in specialist libraries.

The answer lies in accessible writing. Hunt, like many others, has repeatedly demonstrated that lucidity does not compromise scholarship. To believe, as some historians— particularly those infected by the post-modernist virus— do, that convoluted prose equals profundity is patently ridiculous. On the contrary, it is the story-telling ability of a historian that should be at a premium, ideological preferences notwithstanding.

In this book, using a wealth of contemporary accounts, Hunt has demonstrated that the far-flung parts of the globe that made up the parts of the world map coloured red have both inter-locking and separate histories. Bridgetown in the West Indies, for example, grew in prominence as the centre of trade in slaves from West Africa and as a producer of sugar. The sugar economy in turn linked Bridgetown to India and China, the principal producers of tea. And both these centres were connected to Liverpool, one of the principal ports catering to the sweetened-by-sugar tea economy.

Yet, while trade bound various parts of the Empire into a common ecosystem, their politics differed substantially. Boston, a city founded by non-conformist Anglican dissidents fleeing Stuart persecution, equated the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ with no-taxation- wherever-possible. This differed substantially from the loyalism of both Bridgetown and, at the other end of the earth, Melbourne, which developed a reputation for being the most imperial-minded city of the Empire. Boston was a city where a mix of rugged Puritan individualism plus the preponderance of smugglers proved extremely lethal for imperial interests. Mercifully for London, this wasn’t the case with the rest of the colonial possessions.

Likewise, there were differences over how the British viewed different parts of the Empire. The Union drastically diminished the commercial and political importance of Dublin. But Empire provided the Irish and, for that matter, the Scots additional opportunities as soldiers, administrators and merchants. The Scots (and Marwaris) dominated the commercial life of Calcutta and a significant chunk of the Indian Civil Service was made up of Irishmen. Indeed, I believe that Hunt should have added Edinburgh to the list of cities that made the British Empire. Apart from Calcutta, the Scots seem to be among the great casualties of de-colonisation.

For the British, as Hunt has vividly demonstrated, the Empire wasn’t always a win-win project. In political terms Britain became a power, but the terms of trade weren’t always weighed in favour of the manufacturing industries at home. Nor did Empire help in improving the quality of life. By the late-19th century, in fact, there were a large number of public-minded Englishmen who felt that the racial stock would be considerably enhanced by the injection of clean air and sunshine, such as that which existed in Australia.

In terms of the great ‘civilising’ mission, Hunt documents the double standards that prevailed in imperial attitudes towards the ‘white’ town and ‘black’ town. The move towards enlightened town planning was inspired by Dublin and also got a fillip during the sewage constructions in Bombay. However, in places such as Calcutta, the indigenous elite opted out of civic life and lolled about in their great country estates—an unintended consequence of the Permanent Settlement.

Finally, Hunt’s study provides revealing insights into modern-day attitudes to the proverbial ‘stones’ of Empire. The Irish (until recently) have been dismissive of Dublin’s Georgian architectural heritage; in Bombay, the site of the original Kala Ghoda is a car park; and crude mod-con embellishments have taken away some of the charms of many Lutyens-inspired bungalows. Ironically, it is Calcutta that has suddenly woken up to the delights of Empire. Mamata Banerjee now seeks to transform the city of the Black Hole into a second London!

Who says history only follows an economic trajectory? There are just too many unintended consequences.

(Swapan Dasgupta is a conservative thinker and political commentator based in Delhi)

Ten Cities that Made an EmpireTristram Hunt