The Transformation of the World (61 page)

Manchester, a “Shock City”

Washington occupied a marginal place in the city system and was a long way from the industrial powerhouses of the nineteenth-century economy. Of the capital cities, it was Berlin—no match for the history of London, Paris, and Vienna or for their central location in the city system—that most closely corresponded to an industrial city. No other place during the industrialization of Germany concentrated so much cutting-edge technology, especially in the electrical industry. Berlin was not a center of the first phase of industrialization based on steam power; it found its character with the systematic application of science to industrial production. Corporate research and development, closely linked to state-organized science and large customers, had never before been so important for economic innovation. The Berlin of the Kaiserreich became the first “technopolis” or, as Peter Hall put it, “the first Silicon Valley.”
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Paris, in particular, was by comparison a city of services and small businesses; the two were, from an economic point of view, a metropolis of the past and a metropolis of the future.

Not only Paris but some of the fastest-growing and economically most modern cities in the world never became really prominent centers of industry. The dominant pattern in London, unlike late nineteenth-century Berlin or Moscow, was a combination of small and medium-sized industry with a large service sector, including the international financial services of the city. New York, around 1890, was still essentially a mercantile city and a port.
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Both New York
and London drew much of their dynamism from their own internal needs; both had a construction industry that was an important engine of growth. London did not have large iron and steel plants on the scale of Krupps in Essen (where one entrepreneurial family dominated an entire city), and its textile sector (like those in Paris and Berlin) consisted more of tailors and ready-to-wear manufacturers than of mechanized cotton spinners and weavers. London and the Lower Thames led the field in shipbuilding at the beginning of the century, but by its end Glasgow and Liverpool had moved into first and second place.
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London's locational advantages pointed not toward large corporate specialization but to a wide variety of branches of production; they ensured that it did not look like a typical center of the textile, steel, or chemicals industry. The impression that large firms are generally more modern than small businesses is misleading. As the nineteenth century progressed, the economic modernity of a big city lay increasingly in its capacity for innovation—which is possible in many different forms of enterprise.
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Where does one find “typical” industrial cities—a nineteenth-century type doubtlessly without historical precedent?
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At first they were to be seen only in England. People from France or Germany who visited the English Midlands before 1850 were used to the old-style towns of the early modern age and did not understand industry-driven urbanization. They might have experienced the damp basement dwellings of Manchester as an intensification of the urban poverty familiar to them back home, but they were unprepared for the smokestack landscapes and giant factories. Manchester, in particular, because of its new physical dimensions, seemed in the 1830s and 1840s like the “shock city” of the age.
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Here were seven-story factory buildings that had been built without a thought for aesthetics or how they fit into their urban surroundings; this was clearest not so much in the inner city as in small localities where industry had shaken everything up in the briefest space of time. In the first generation of industrialization—roughly from 1760 to 1790 in England—the new factories already towered over most of the settlements in which they were built. Two or three might turn a village into a small town, and later a single company created many an industrial center. Chimneys became hallmarks of a new kind of economy, defining a cityscape even when they were disguised as Italian campaniles.
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Other cities were completely refounded as localities that for a long time would have industry as their basic reason for existence: from Sheffield to Oberhausen, from Katowice to Pittsburgh. Others might have had a really significant preindustrial past, but were transformed by industry for the first time into large cities.

The much-maligned Manchester, which observers such as Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, and Alexis de Tocqueville saw as an apparatus to transform civilization into barbarism, was the best-known example of such a single-function metropolis.
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Here new industrial concentrations and an influx of labor ran ahead of any possible development of infrastructure. The population of Birmingham more than tripled between 1800 and 1850, from 71,000 to 230,000, while
Manchester grew in the same period from 81,000 to 400,000, and the port city of Liverpool from 76,000 to 422,000.
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Manchester and cities like it shocked people at the time by their dirt, noise, and smells, but also because they seemed to lack a clear urban form; they grew very quickly, without the institutions and distinguishing features regarded as essential to a city. Economic functionality created spaces and social environments for itself, whereas earlier it would not have occurred to anyone to see the economy as the ultimate basis for city life.
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This was reflected in the architecture, since the factory could not be inserted smoothly into the general design. In such cities, the focus of urban planning changed from comprehensive design to local problem-solving. Factories whose location had been chosen purely to maximize profits inevitably had a centrifugal effect, whereas the European city had traditionally always tended to build up the downtown area.
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Perhaps the reason why new city halls, from Manchester and Leeds to Hamburg and Vienna, were so much larger than their early modern predecessors was that those responsible for them wanted to balance the symbolism of capital (and in Vienna, the court) with a symbol of the public spirit.

To be sure, the Manchester model was not the only possible way of linking industry and city. Birmingham, for example, as Tocqueville recognized after a visit to both cities, used a different formula that corresponded to its more diversified economic structure, and Manchester was not as typical as the young Friedrich Engels would claim not long afterward.
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The Ruhr region, too, arose out of a pure combination of economic factors, yet it came up with quite different solutions. Its recipe for success was found at the moment when four elements came together: coal extraction, coke technology, the railroad, and the influx of labor from farther east. At first, however, there were no urban structures in the Ruhr Valley, only sprawling workers' settlements with up to 100,000 inhabitants, which initially had the legal status of villages. The Ruhr did not develop a single urban core throughout the nineteenth century. It was an early example of a “conurbation,” a multipolar urban space, as radically new in its way as the concentrated industrial city of the Manchester type.
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Today some historians doubt whether even Manchester corresponded to the stereotype of a pure industrial city grinding down its human population. They stress that its early economy was much more varied than an exclusive focus on its cotton industry would suggest. Manchester, too, was part of a city system and a division of labor that eventually took in the whole of central England. Large industrial cities could continue developing only if they played their special role within such systems and if they managed to organize their insertion into a number of environments, from the immediate vicinity to the world market. Industrialists—the pioneering generation as well as those who came later—were more than slave-driving factory masters; they had to form “networks,” to keep in mind both advances in technology and the general economic and political situation, and to concern themselves with the collective representation of their interests.
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The industrial city should therefore not be viewed only from the point of view of the factory. At least in the larger cities, which were not dominated by a handful of enterprises, a cultural climate took shape in which innovation was possible. Cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds were able to rise above the chaos of their industrial takeoff and to draw largely on their own resources of civic involvement. They improved the community infrastructure, founded museums and municipal universities (as opposed to the medieval institutions in Oxford and Cambridge), and adorned their centers with prestigious buildings—above all, a theater and a magnificent city hall, in which a giant organ had pride of place in the main assembly room.
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The spectrum of human settlements shaped by industry was very broad. It encompassed primitive barracks (as in Russia and Japan), where conditions were at least as bad as in the slums of large industrial cities, but also model instances of entrepreneurial patriarchy, where the factory owner lived beside his factory and ensured that the workplace and his workers' housing conditions were tolerable.
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5 The Golden Age of Port Cities

London was, apart from everything else, a port city. Indeed, its whole history from at least the seventeenth century, when overseas trade with the West and East Indies began in earnest, might be described from an ocean vantage. If we were to distinguish between a maritime-mercantile and a continental-political model of a capital city, no place represented them both as perfectly as London did.
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At first sight, port cities appear to be archaic; industrial cities, modern. But this is deceptive. Not only did some large cities—Antwerp is a good example—convert economy from a preindustrial production economy to an international port/service economy;
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the nineteenth century also witnessed a transportation revolution that radically altered the nature of port cities. In some parts of the world, urbanization actually began in ports and is still largely confined to them; in the Caribbean,
all
cities that remain important today were founded in the seventeenth century as export-oriented ports. A world of small colonial ports thus came into existence, with Kingston and Havana as the most important; it was tightly woven together by trade and (before 1730 or thereabouts) by piracy.
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Rise of the Port City

The nineteenth century was the golden age of ports and port cities—or more precisely, of
large
ports, since only a few could handle the huge quantities involved in the expansion of world trade. In Britain, exports in 1914 were concentrated in twelve port cities, whereas at the beginning of the nineteenth century a large number of cities had been involved in shipping and overseas trade. On the East Coast of the United States, New York constantly strengthened its leading position. After 1820 it became the main port for America's most important export good: cotton. At first cotton ships sailed from Charleston or New Orleans
to Liverpool or Le Havre, then stopped in New York, loaded with immigrants and European exports, on the return trip. Increasingly, however, cotton was shipped directly north from the Southern plantations to New York. Until the Civil War, New York middlemen, shipowners, insurers, and bankers dominated the international trade of the Southern states.
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In China a series of treaty ports opened for overseas commerce between 1842 and 1861, to be joined later by many more. Toward the end of the century, only Shanghai and the British crown colony of Hong Kong had kept pace with the demands of ocean transport, and to a lesser extent Tianjin, the main port in northern China; and Dalian at the southern tip of Manchuria grew fully into the role.

Seaports were what airports became in the second half of the twentieth century: the key transaction points between countries and continents. The first things that arriving travelers saw from the sea were the quays and buildings of a harbor front; the first local people they encountered were pilots, longshoremen, and customs officials. As steamships, freight loads, and crowds of intercontinental migrants multiplied in size and number, sea travel acquired a significance it had never previously had. Of course, not every nation in history with an opening to the sea has shown a liking for salt water; many island dwellers forgot the nautical techniques that had brought their ancestors there in the first place. Tasmanians even lost the habit of eating fish.
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As Alain Corbin has shown, continental Europeans—or at least the French, who are his main focus of interest—developed an open-minded attitude to the sea only around the middle of the eighteenth century. Amsterdam, which in 1607 was brilliantly conceived as a cityscape between land and water, was an early exception.
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Outside the Netherlands, coasts and harbors did not become popular themes in painting until the eighteenth century—the period when ports also came to be thought of as worthy of architectural expenditure and top-level feats of engineering. Promenades were built for the first time on the shores of many coastal cities; even in Britain it was only after the 1820s that such an addition was considered de rigueur.
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On the other hand, the Ottoman upper classes, leaving continental Asia behind, discovered way back in the fourteenth century the delights of a life by the sea. Istanbul, which they conquered in 1453, offered ideal conditions for the construction of palaces, pavilions, and villas with a view over the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn.
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The idea of declaring a stretch of bare sand as a beach on which to enjoy the pleasures of the sea occurred to people in Europe only in the late nineteenth century.

That turn to the sea was by no means everywhere a “natural” tendency is also shown by the fact that farsighted early modern governments (as in France under Louis XIV or in Russia under Peter the Great) had to make special efforts to construct trading stations and naval bases. It is probably the case that in every historical era before the nineteenth century, most of the largest cities and main centers of power or cultural splendor were
not
situated on the coast: Kaifeng, Nanjing, and Beijing; Ayudhya and Kyoto; Baghdad, Agra, Isfahan, and Cairo;
Rome, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, and Moscow; and not least, Mexico City. North America was the only conspicuous exception to the rule:
all
major cities in the early United States were ports or had easy access to the sea. The great Japanese historian Amino Yoshihiko, who took a close interest in people living on the coast, came to the conclusion that even insular Japan, with a total coastline approaching 28,000 kilometers, always defined itself as an agrarian society and never made sea travel, fishing, and maritime trade central elements of its collective identity.
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Here a clear distinction should be drawn, however, between fishing villages and port cities. In all civilizations fisherfolk live in small, often isolated, communities that preserve their special way of life for an unusually long time. Port cities, on the other hand, are plugged into wider and more up-to-date social trends, in which world market fluctuations determine economic conditions. A port city has a denser web of relations with its counterparts across the water than with fishing villages in its vicinity.