Review: 'Ten Cities that Made an Empire' by Tristram Hunt

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai (formerly Victoria Terminus, Bombay)

I have mixed feelings about MPs writing books. On the one hand, I wonder whether they shouldn’t be busier fighting the corner of their constituents; on the other, it pleases me that any of them remain engaged in a wider intellectual debate. On a still more mysterious third hand, I concede that many of these books are by turns ghostwritten, curiously conscious of the writer’s own place in the history, shamefully bad novels or bizarrely breezy accounts of Winston Churchill’s career. The (likely returning) MP for Stoke Central and Shadow, Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire is, by contrast, a delight. 

Hunt seeks to chart the history and legacy of the British Empire through the urban form and material culture of the ten cities of the title; to explore empire’s changing character through “the street names and fortifications, the news pages, plays and rituals” from Boston in the early 1600s to Liverpool in the present day. In between we journey, in roughly chronological order, to and from Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne and New Delhi (nine of the ten cities started as ports). Ten Cities crosses an astounding sweep of history; each chapter itself often spans a period of more than 200 years. But it is the minutiae that Hunt is concerned with and which he uses to craft a series of urban narratives. In the process, he generates a coherent, if inevitably complex, history of the British Empire.

Boston may seem like an odd place to begin but, as part of Ten Cities’ wider historical narrative, is the natural starting point of both a swing from the West to the East, the Atlantic to the Pacific via Cape Town, and through the processes of colonisation and decolonisation in all their violence. Hunt is a lecturer in modern British history at Queen Mary University, but there is nothing dry or academic about his style. We begin, typically of Hunt’s narrative-driven approach, in medias res, “[as] evening fell on 15 December 1773” - the night of the Boston Tea Party. Hunt is a gifted storyteller, who knows the enticing value of informing his reader that the dissidents included “[men] like James Brewer, a pump- and clockmaker, whose wife had blackened his face with burnt cork…” The insurgents, protesting against a series of unfair, random taxes enacted by the British, proceeded down what today is ‘Freedom Trail’ to commandeer and dump 46 tons of tea into the harbour. 

Hunt asserts that “over 230 years later, Boston, Massachusetts, is still defined by that revolutionary moment”; we quickly become party to his tale: “…turn east from the Old South Meeting House, under the dreary skyscrapers of modern ‘Washington Street’ towards the Old State House and a different Boston peeks out of the past. There, either side of the…balcony from which the Declaration of Independence was read in July 1776, stands a glistening, golden lion and a rearing, silver unicorn” - the coat of arms of the British royal family, ripped down in the aftermath of independence but restored in 1882, now illuminating for us “the hidden history of Imperial Boston”. It is this kind of placement of meaning in the morass of urban sprawl which Hunt excels in. 

Each chapter begins with a map of the relevant city in the central time period covered, helping to locate the reader. For example, in the third chapter, we can pick out how the Georgian areas of today’s Dublin were, under the auspices of the Wide Street Commission, implanted onto the old Norman core, in the process, physically entrenching the ascendancy of the Anglo-Protestant aristocracy over the Catholic majority and transforming Dublin into a city of empire. Hunt is an evocative reporter of architecture, good at combining contemporary sources with his own readings. For example, following a considered description of 1887’s Victoria Terminus in Mumbai emphasising its ‘Italian Medieval Gothic’ stylings, Hunt gushes:

“What this description doesn’t bing out if the joyful chaos: the riot of pediments, sculptures, tympanums and inwards - mongooses, monkeys and peacocks alongside busts of [governor] Sir Bartle Frere and railway worthies…There were so many other startling feats to the station: the marble columns, the cantilevered staircase, the stained-glass windows, the courtyards, verandas, the sheer enormity of a 100-metre heigh and 366-metre-long train shed - and, above all, the high dome of dovetailed ribs, built without centring, Bombay’s answer to Brunelleschi’s Florence Cathedral.”

Ten Cities is tremendously entertaining and informative, if not a heavyweight work of history. As good as Hunt is with urban detail, occasionally passages descend into a tumble of dates, historical figures, quotes and vague architectural terms. Too, he occasionally lapses into a habit I recognised from the lazier (and there were many) moments of my undergraduate career, when it seems he has found a quote saying what he wants and so plonks it in with little explanation of its origin or context. Otherwise, only in the chapter on Melbourne, did I feel that the wider history of the British Empire was being privileged over the city itself; but generally, Hunt’s skill as a historian is that he manages to show rather than tell, using his chosen cities as the vehicle. 

Ten Cities is essentially a survey; not so much of how ten cities were shaped by an empire as how an empire was shaped by ten cities - an idea that is quietly radical and executed brilliantly. In 2015, we have entered an era when it is the influence of global cities that seems to shape people’s lives as much as countries. It is fitting that this book ends with Liverpool, a city perfectly encapsulating the ‘Janus face of empire’, built up by transatlantic trade, brought low by changing global economic forces and now, as the beneficiary of investment by India and China, rising again. 

Hunt backs up his thesis that “…it is the very complexity of this urban past which allows us to go beyond the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cul-de-sac of much imperial debate.” This is not a work of colonial nostalgia and, particularly as we near the present day, Hunt is explicit in clarifying this. But it also recognises that a fruitful approach to a history of the British Empire must amount to more than condemnation; that in all sorts of strange and fascinating ways, the legacies of empire were not something simply passed on from ruler to ruled, but a hybrid collaboration, most potently felt, and still felt, in the fabric of these global cities.