The Transformation of the World (64 page)

Segregation

It is easy to identify the spatial dualism between a privileged foreigners' district, well protected and often climatically more agreeable, and areas of the city inhabited by locally born people. But this binary opposition is also a model construct. Power relations and social stratification were not consistently reflected in a rigid division of the city layout. And even when they were, the dependence of European colonials on teams of local domestics stood in the way of a sharp separation between the areas in which people lived. The colonizers were rarely alone among themselves. They acted in everyday life on a semiofficial stage, before an indigenous public that had its eyes trained on them. The segregation of housing did not always entail a univocal relationship of subordination and superordination. Kazan on the Volga, for example, had a Russian district and a Tatar district, even though it was impossible without qualification to describe conditions there as colonial.
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In very large cities, at least in Asia, special minority communities had been tolerated since early modern times; often these were located in the same part of the city, as in Istanbul, where at least 130,000 non-Muslims were permanently resident in 1886.
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Also many South and Southeast Asian cities offered to Europeans a picture of coexistence within integrated communities that was mostly, though not always, peaceful. They were—like cities in the Ottoman Empire—
villes plurielles
, where religion and language were the most important sorting criteria.
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European colonialism overlaid such mosaic structures without actually erasing them.

Segregation did not at all derive from some “essence” of the colonial city; it had a history of its own. In Delhi, conquered by the British in 1803, there was no special British district until the Indian Mutiny of 1857/58. Lord Palmerston and many others then called for the city to be razed to the ground in punishment, but despite major destruction (e.g., of the Red Fort of the Mogul emperors) things were never taken that far.
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After the horrors of 1857, many Britons wanted to live away from the “native city.” Yet Indian landownership continued to be permitted in the new foreigners' district, and the police were never able to guarantee the complete security of the colonial “masters” from Indian robbers. Many English people rented accommodations from Indians in their “own” district, while continuing to work (and to enjoy themselves) in the old city. After the outbreak of plague in 1903, the advantages of suburban housing construction were proved, and more and more Indian landowners moved into the “civil lines” (as the British district was called).
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In Bombay, however, the fortresslike “factory” of the East India Company formed the nucleus of urban development, to which a “native town” was attached only in the early nineteenth century. Later still, garden suburbs were created as a third element for well-to-do Europeans.
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What actually distinguishes
colonial
segregation within a city from other kinds of spatial separation? In European cities there were (and are) micropatterns of segregation, sometimes from one street to the next or vertically within the same apartment block (with the bourgeois on the
bel étage
and the impoverished writer in the garret).
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Segregation, loosely defined, is a widespread phenomenon, an elementary form of social differentiation that manifests itself in many different ways. “Colonial” may here mean no more than urban apartheid along ethnic lines, enforced by the ruling apparatus of a regime consisting of minority foreigners. However, there are few examples of this. Some of the toughest segregation practices known in modern history were completely without ethnic overtones: for example, the separation of warriors from commoners in Edo during the Tokugawa period. Conversely, it is hard to decide whether the Irish in early Victorian industrial and port cities, and a little later in North America, remained in lower positions of the social hierarchy for social or for “ethnic” (which here also means religious) reasons.
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The Irish were “white,” but there were many shades of whiteness.
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On closer inspection, then, the ideal type of the colonial city loses its sharp contours. Not every city in the territory of a colony becomes a typical colonial city, and the distinction between a colonial city and a noncolonial one with similar functions should not be overstated. The fact that both Madras and Marseille are port cities probably means that what they have in common more than outweighs the colonial/noncolonial distinction. On the other hand, there was something like a colonial transition period in the global development of cities, stretching from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. Whereas the “frontier city” as typified by Boston, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town had been an early modern innovation in previously nonurban settings, the “modern” colonial city of European origin imprinted itself on the old urban cultures of North Africa and Asia and sometimes provoked their resistance. Never before in history had European urban patterns had such an impact in the rest of the world. The colonial city, in the strict sense of the term, disappeared along with the colonial empires. Today it appears as a stopover point on the way to the postcolonial megacity of the present, whose evolution has departed from earlier European models and is fueled by partly local, partly global sources—a dynamic that is not specifically European or Western.

Colonial Westernization

Colonial past and later evolution into a megacity are so variably related to each other that general statements are hard to justify. Of the ten largest cities in the world in the year 2000, only one was a former imperial metropolis, Tokyo; or two if New York is considered the center of American world hegemony.
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The most important imperial metropolises of the period between 1850 and 1960—London and Paris—have long ceased to figure among the top cities in population size, but they have ensured themselves the status of “global cities,”
that is, as nodal points at the highest level of the global city system and multiple concentrations of worldwide steering capacity. With the exception of London, today's global cities (the frontrunners are Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris) do not have this status
because
they used to be colonial metropolises. Apart from Tokyo, all ten
leading
cities (even New York!) were once “colonial cities,” albeit in different ways and at different points in time. When Seoul fell under Japanese colonial rule in 1905, Mexico City already had nearly a century of postcolonial history behind it. Cairo was formally colonized for only thirty-six years (1882–1918); Batavia/Jakarta for 330 years (1619–1949). Other formerly spectacular colonial cities have not gone the way of megapolization; Cape Town, Hanoi, and Dakar, to name but a few, now lead a relatively modest existence. Centers of once great colonial empires, such as Madrid or Amsterdam, have become middle-ranking tourist destinations. Cities that, by anything other than a purely statistical yardstick, might also count as megalopolises—Bangkok and Moscow, for example—were never colonized; and Shanghai was, but only in a quite special, limited degree.

The era of colonial cities was a
nonspecific
preparation for the age of globally networked megacities, and it is all too easy to ask whether a colonial past has proved to be an advantage or a disadvantage for the present day. A negative formulation would be safest: a past as a colonized city has been neither a necessary condition nor a main cause of the urban explosion since the middle of the twentieth century, and previous “possession” of a colonial empire has been no guarantee of a leading place as a city in the postcolonial world.

Neo-European frontier cities in the British settler colonies (dominions), most strikingly in Australia but also in Canada (especially the west) and New Zealand, constitute a type of their own. They are a direct product of European colonization and have little in them that is “hybrid.” Since they were not inserted into a preexisting cityscape but took shape under frontier conditions, they do not correspond to the ideal type of the colonial city, as defined above. Nor were Australian cities mere copies of British ones in the way that Spanish settlements in the Americas, for all their local differences, essentially reproduced a Spanish model. What they resemble most closely are the cities of the American Midwest, whose key advance took place around the same period. Unlike the colonial cities of Asia or North Africa, Australian cities have experienced continuous development. There was no sudden decolonization but rather a slow, constant, and peaceful process of political emancipation within a British constitutional framework. Economically, the Australian cities remained “colonial” so long as they were dependent on the London financial market (which gradually changed after 1860),
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so long as they represented markets in the British Empire for which there were no alternatives, and so long as their own external trade was handled largely by agencies of British firms.
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One striking novelty of nineteenth-century colonialism was the treaty port.
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In Asia and Africa, rulers had normally restricted trading activity by foreigners
to special zones and tried to control them as tightly as possible. The traders were granted certain residence rights.
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After 1840, when China, Japan, and Korea opened up one after the other to international trade, it was clear even to the most fanatical free trader that these economic spaces could not be “penetrated” through the unfettered operation of market forces alone. Special institutional forms were required, with the threat of military force ultimately behind them. A series of “unequal treaties” gave Westerners unilateral privileges, especially immunity from legal action in Asian courts, and trade regimes were set up that denied local governments control over customs policy. In some of the cities opened to foreigners under the treaty provisions (not all of which were treaty
ports
), small downtown areas were even withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the local state and placed under either foreign consuls (the concessions) or self-governing foreign trading oligarchies (the settlements).

The general significance of these extraterritorial enclaves or port colonies, as they were appositely known, should not be exaggerated.
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In Japan they were for some years the main gateway for Western influences, but after 1868 they soon lost importance as the modernization policies of the Meiji state turned to unreserved cooperation with the West. They did not play a large role in the urbanization of Japan. Yokohama was the only one of the country's major cities to be founded as a treaty port. The first foreigners settled there in 1859, and thirty years later the port city had a population of 120,000 (mostly Japanese, of course)—a growth as swift as that of Vladivostok, founded nine years after Yokohama.
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In China the treaty ports were much more significant. Nevertheless, of the ninety-two ports that had at some point acquired this status by 1915, only seven ever had European minicolonies within their boundaries. And of those seven, only two were deeply marked by their foreign enclaves: Shanghai with its International Settlement and French Concession, and the northern city of Tianjin, where nine concessions, much smaller than those in Shanghai, came into being. The rapid growth of the two cities after 1860 was due mainly to an increasing orientation of the Chinese economy to the world market, which was in turn encouraged by the presence of foreigners in the protected treaty ports.

Some of the smaller concessions (e.g., in Canton and Amoy) were akin to insular “ghettoes,” but such a word is not appropriate to the special areas in Shanghai and Tianjin. As late as the 1920s, the International Settlement in Shanghai was governed by representatives of the large Western corporations in China, with no formal Chinese involvement. But 99 percent of its population was Chinese, who were allowed to own real estate and could engage in many kinds of economic activity. The scope for radical politics was also greater there than in the part of the city under Chinese jurisdiction, its theoretically law-based polity enabling the formation of a critical Chinese public.
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Beyond its many other locational advantages, Shanghai grew up around its colonial core. The concessions and settlements in the treaty ports became entry points for the transfer of Western models of the city. Instead of a pompous palace
architecture, the buildings were designed mainly to express an openness to the world market, although it was only in the 1930s that large corporate headquarters gave the Bund its well-known skyline. From time to time a Disneyland fantasy would appear: for example, Gordon Hall, the administrative center of the British Concession in Tianjin, whose towers and battlements made it look for all the world like a medieval fortress; or the reproduction of a German small town, complete with half-timbered buildings and bull's-eye windows, in Qingdao, the main city of the German “leased area” (i.e., colony) in the northeastern province of Shandong. More important, a new image of the city emerged in places where the settlements were able to expand: wide streets, somewhat less dense housing, stone and mortar materials even in Chinese-style houses, and above all a greater openness to the street (in contrast to the windowless walls that had traditionally sealed off the houses, so that only storefronts looked out at passersby).
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Urban Self-Westernization

“Colonial cities” did not exist only in colonies. Some of the most striking “colonial cities” originated not in an initiative by a colonial authority but in acts of preventive self-Westernization. In the twentieth century such things were no longer surprising. By the 1920s at the latest, everyone was agreed on what should be part of a “modern civilized city”: paved streets, potable water on tap, drains and sewers, garbage removal, public toilets, fire-resistant buildings, lighting in the main streets and squares, some elements of a public transportation system, extensive rail links, public schools for some if not all, a health service with a hospital, a mayor, a police force, and a reasonably professional municipal administration. Even when external conditions were unfavorable—for example, in China of the 1920s and 1930s, torn apart by civil war—local elites and potentates tried at least to approximate to these goals.
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It troubled no one that the model was of Western origin. But local circumstances imposed the most varied adaptations and omissions.