The British empire came to cover a third of the world's terrestrial surface but even at the peak of its power in the mid-19th century questions were raised in London about its sustainability. The United Kingdom gloried in its conquests and its civilising mission. Prudent politicians were nevertheless conscious of the strain on the resources of people and finance that this imposed. Two smallish islands, Britain and Ireland, ruled distant countries that dwarfed them in size; and as rival European powers began to mount a challenge to them in the era before the first world war, Kipling's brooding poetry pointed up the fragility of Britain's global supremacy.
As the years wore on, many churchmen and even more socialists also questioned the morality of the empire. This started a debate that has continued off and on to the present day. Tristram Hunt takes a middle position between the two sides in the preface to his book. He dislikes any cut-and-dried analysis that suggests that the effects of British rule were wholly good or wholly bad for the subject peoples.
Taking 10 cities around the world, from Liverpool and Dublin to Hong Kong and Melbourne, he uses them to explain the dizzying expansion of British colonial possessions from the 17th century onwards. Once he has cleared his throat, like a preacher who senses what his congregation really wants, he stops sermonising and tells lively stories that are quietly instructive. This is an original and successful project that blends geopolitics and local economic developments in such a way that reinforce each other. The point is always to show how settlers defended their interests by pressurising the cabinet in far-off London. At the same time, ministers took a gauge of what was a sustainable policy while they maximised the advantage to the metropolis.
Boston in New England is the first of Hunt's cities, and he reminds us that this present-day bastion of American-Irish Catholicism started as a fortress of English nonconformism. Pope's day was the local equivalent of Guy Fawkes night and the celebrations involved wild displays of loyalty to the British Protestant crown. The colonists needed the old country to protect them against the French; Britain benefited from imports of cotton, fur and cod. Things went wrong when the British needed to raise their taxes across the ocean. The Bostonians, objecting to the new excise rates, held their famous tea party in 1773. Within a few years the first empire had fallen apart and the Americans gained their independence.
The book's next port of call is Bridgetown in Barbados. Hunt narrates how the Caribbean islands quickly replaced New England as the hub of imperial aggrandisement through the systematic maltreatment of hundreds of thousands of Africans who had been shipped as slaves to work the sugar plantations. Here there is no attempt to chart a middle path between the good and the bad, and the brutal decadence of slave-owners who sought to cut costs in competition with cheaper cane from nearby French Martinique is exposed. The elegance of the sugar barons in the 18th-century parliament at Westminster rested on appalling human misery across the Atlantic.
Successive governments were shrewd when choosing places to colonise. But the case of Dublin shows that they could get things wrong. Generations of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy were never mere errand boys for the British crown, and the problems only increased after the merging of the two parliaments in 1801. Hunt highlights the political and denominational intricacies of Ireland's capital. He also points up the fear in Westminster that the French might occupy the island and pose a military threat from both west and south.
Calculations of security were at the heart of the decision to seize Cape Town from Dutch settlers in 1795. The British had earlier been content to use the port without owning it. For the trading vessels of the East India Company it offered a haven for revictualling and refitting on the long sea journey between India and the mother country. But as the war with France became global, the danger was that the French might occupy Africa's southern tip and strangle Britain's Asian commerce. In 1802, once the fighting stopped, the geopolitical peril faded and the British government handed the city back to the Afrikaners. But France was not yet defeated. When war restarted, the Royal Navy was dispatched to retake Cape Town in 1806 – a bloodier affair second time around.
The episode shows that it was not just in the years after the second world war that Britain gave up colonies. The big difference is that Clement Attlee and Harold Macmillan – unlike William Pitt the Younger – reserved no right to recolonise that which they decided to liberate. Once the empire was dismantled in the 1960s, it was effectively gone forever, even though Britain still scrambled to maintain its influence through the Commonwealth and the multinational corporations it left behind.
Another of Hunt's 10 cities is Hong Kong, which was handed back to the Chinese only in 1997. As an entrepôt for opium exports from British India to China it was of logistical importance throughout the 19th century. The British deployed superior military technology to bully the emperor in Beijing and secure the trade in goods that British consumers craved. Hong Kong fostered an excruciating snobbery in its dinner party set and at the jockey club as the colonial masters imposed themselves on the industrious migrant Chinese whom they despised. This contrasted with the attitude taken by at least a section of the imperial administration towards their subjects in Calcutta and Bombay. Whereas the languages and customs of the subcontinent were studied and often admired, Hunt argues that the British in China felt they had nothing to learn.
His key interest is in urban architecture and landscape. Sometimes the broader social focus could be sharper. When covering Melbourne, for example, he writes little about the origins of the early residents. And whereas some administrators in New Delhi were enlightened by their own standards, Gandhi surely had a point when asked about his attitude to British civilisation: "I think it would be a very good idea!"
No book can deal with everything, and Hunt will need to look again at some of his dates for Britain's wars. But the chapters are a cracking read, a true Baedeker for trips to the far-flung shores of imperial history. Fittingly his last city is Liverpool, which at the beginning of the 20th century carried a third of all the goods passing out of the United Kingdom to the rest of the world. It lost out to the London docks between the two world wars. Liverpool plumbed its nadir when its council bankrupted itself under the rule of Militant Tendency in the 1980s. Today, as Hunt sees things, its regeneration depends mainly on attracting financial capital from the very countries, China and India, whose commerce it once exploited. This is a bleak conclusion for anyone who believes that Britain's salvation rests in British hands. Hunt urges the need to face the facts of globalisation, and he heartily recommends the colonisation of the old country by the big corporations of its former subject peoples.
