McLaughlin on Schneer

Abstract

Reviewed by: London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis Joseph McLaughlin Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999) Early in London 1900, Jonathan Schneer cites Asa Briggs’ notion of the “world city”: a fount of intellectual creativity and endeavor, an economic powerhouse, a center of communications, an entrepot without parallel, the heart of world finance. New York, he argues, is such a city today. “A hundred years ago,” Schneer suggests, “London was all those things and something beyond, namely the capital of a formally constituted and governed empire upon which the sun never set, an imperial city” (10). London 1900 is Schneer’s ambitious attempt to show how this fact distinguished London’s residents from those of other cities. Schneer’s study also seeks to focus our gaze on the empire’s impact on London, rather than the more traditional scholarly gesture of chronicling how imperialism refashioned the rest of the world. In order to write what amounts to a portrait or snapshot of the imperial metropolis at a closely defined historical moment, Schneer juxtaposes a wide variety of biographical sketches of London residents, some well-known, such as the travel writer Mary Kingsley and the labor leader John Burns, and others not so well-known such as the journalist Flora Shaw and the driving force behind the first Pan-African Conference (1900), Henry Sylvester Williams. Schneer, best known as a historian of late-Victorian and Edwardian labor movements, is the author of two previous biographies: Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader (University of Illinois Press, 1982) and George Lansbury (Manchester University Press, 1990). In the current work, his effort to combine more than a dozen smaller biographical works yields a fascinating picture of the imperial politics of the metropolis. In reflecting on the structure of his book, I am reminded of those longer novels of Dickens in which a sizable cast of memorable characters add up to what can best be articulated as London itself. Besides the biographical approach, Schneer also attends to the built environment (the streets, Docklands), popular culture (Sherlock Holmes and the music halls), significant public rituals (the parade of the City Imperial Volunteers on their return from South Africa), and the political life of the imperial metropolis (the Khaki Election of 1900). If there is a significant omission in this book (and how could there not be one in a book so ambitiously comprehensive?), it is the relative silence on matters of imperialism as it influenced commodity consumption and advertisement. Schneer does usefully point readers toward important work by Anne McClintock and Annie Coombes, yet a fuller discussion of consumption would have provided a more persuasive argument about how imperialism saturated the daily lives of Londoners. The second chapter, “The Face of Imperial London,” engagingly discusses the negotiations surrounding the Aldwych-Holborn project that resulted in Kingsway, a compromise between the centralizing desire to enhance imperial grandeur and the vagaries of private enterprise (23). While it is certainly not original to argue that the political culture of London prevented the kind of urban revision carried out by Baron Haussman in Paris, nevertheless, the Kingsway project illustrates a central thesis of Schneer’s, namely that the imperial metropolis was the product of a complex interaction, of reciprocal, occasionally antagonistic forces and processes, of a multiplicity of rhetorics (14). Indeed, the book is organized around this sense of antagonism. Part I, “Imperial London,” includes chapters on “The Face of London,” “The Nexus of Empire” (Docklands), the role of financial imperialism played by the City, and the popular culture of the metropolis. Schneer devotes Part II to “Alternative Imperial Londons,” and discusses the work of women as writers, lecturers, and orchestrater of political salons, the continued efforts of the Irish residing in London to construct a nationalist culture, the careers of Dadabhai Nairoji and other Indians to establish a London Branch of the Indian National Congress (the BCINC), and “Roots of the Pan-African Conference.” In both halves of the book, Schneer is very careful to locate sources of resistance and anti-imperialism. So, for instance, while the London dockers may be laboring on behalf of the empire, their organized and unorganized resistance (strikes...