Colonial Port Research Articles

Palimpsests of Progress: Erasing the Past and Rewriting the Future in Developing Societies—Case Studies of Singapore and Jakarta

The former colonial port cities of Southeast Asia are complex in both their landscapes and their collective memories. Centuries of European imperial domination have left a mark on their townscapes and, more so in some cases than in others, on their contemporary political and social cultures. During the colonial period, the integration of these port cities into global trade networks also fostered inter‐ and intra‐regional migration and, thus, the development of complex cultural mixes in their demographic composition. In recent decades, and following the attainment of political independence, this region has experienced spectacular economic growth and the development of a range of nationalisms, both of which have had a considerable impact on the recent transformation of their (capital) cityscapes. Singapore and Jakarta are presented here as case studies of the ways in which economic, political and cultural forces have interacted to produce cityscapes in which elements of the past are variously eliminated, hidden, privileged, integrated and/or reinvented.

‘An infection of locality’: plague, pythogenesis and the poor in Bombay, c. 1896–1905

In September 1896, a virulent plague epidemic broke out in the colonial port city of Bombay. Central to existing interpretations of the epidemic has been the pervasive assumption that colonial policies aimed at suppressing the disease were principally informed by ‘contagionist’ etiological doctrine. However, this article argues that long-standing ‘localist’ etiological theories continued to exercise a critical influence over colonial policies. It thereby highlights the explicit ‘class’ bias that informed the colonial state's anti-plague offensive, which was largely directed at the urban poor.

Markets in the Meadows: Department Stores and Shopping Centers in the Decentralization of Philadelphia, 1920–1980

Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.

Markets in the Meadows: Department Stores and Shopping Centers in the Decentralization of Philadelphia, 1920–1980

Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.

The Ottoman City between East and West. Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul

Introduction: was there an Ottoman city? 1. Aleppo: the Ottoman Empire's caravan city Bruce Masters 2. Izmir: from village to colonial port city Daniel Goffman 3. Istanbul: from imperial to peripheralized capital Edhem Eldem Conclusion: contexts and characteristics Works consulted Index.

Changing a culture of corruption: How Hong Kong’s independent commission against corruption succeeded in furthering a culture of lawfulness

The former British Crown Colony of Hong Kong is generally regarded as one of the finest examples of a laissez-faire, free market economy in the world. With its large natural harbor, close proximity to China, Taiwan, Japan, and other commercial powerhouses, and highly industrious population of about six million, 98 percent of whom are Chinese, Hong Kong was destined to play the role of commercial and financial center of Asia. After the Japanese occupation of the Second World War and the British resumption of control, Hong Kong began to achieve economic success. Although the population swelled during the 1950s and 1960s from a prewar level of less than one million to five million by the 1970s, Hong Kong was able to maintain social stability and economic progress, while providing housing and social services for the rapid influx of Chinese refugees from the People's Republic of China (PRC). Political turmoil in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and continued economic desperation caused thousands to risk arrest, imprisonment, and even death, to cross the border into Hong Kong in search of a better life. For a brief period in 1967, some of the Mainland China-based disturbances did spill over into Hong Kong resulting in attacks on police stations and violent demonstrations inspired by Communist agitators. It is a well-known fact that millions of Mainland Chinese perished during the Cultural Revolution, one of the darkest periods in modem Chinese history. While postwar conditions in Hong Kong were not ideal, they at least provided the opportunity for refugees to obtain food, housing, employment, and education for children, albeit under fiercely competitive conditions. By the 1970s and 1980s, Hong Kong's economy was booming and workers at all levels were enjoying an unprecedented rise in living standards. In fact, Hong Kong was rapidly developing a middle class and many residents began to look upon Hong Kong as more than simply a stopover on the way to a better life elsewhere. Although there were still others who, having been through the turmoil of the last half-century of Chinese history, sent their children abroad for schooling and opted for the "safety net" of a foreign passport in the event that the situation in Hong Kong changed. With the rise in living standards and the transition from modest colonial trading port to a major international commercial and financial center, Hong Kong developed a "culture of corruption," which was shared by local Chinese and their British colonial administrators. It is arguable as to whether the culture of corruption was a carryover from China, which has been notoriously corrupt throughout its history, or a phenomenon unique to Hong Kong developed during the colonial period. Although the colonial government had anticorruption laws on the books, the famous BlairANTICORRUPTION PROGRAMS IN ACTION

What Do Merchants Believe? Trade and Empire in Colonial New York

What Do Merchants Believe? Trade and Empire in Colonial New York Eric Hinderaker (bio) Cathy Matson. Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. x + 458 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00. The merchant communities of colonial America present scholars with a tantalizing dilemma. Their activities generated rich veins of source materials, but the value of those sources is not immediately apparent: like low-grade ore, the account books, customs records, political debates, and correspondence generated by colonial traders need to be refined before they yield up their meanings. And, as anyone who has ever tried to teach economic history to undergraduates must realize, even then they might not seem all that interesting. Appreciation for the drama inherent in patterns of trade, debates over currency policy, or fights for price regulation, like a love of opera or professional wrestling, is an acquired taste—one that students, and even other scholars, do not always share. To bring merchant activities to a larger audience, historians must often resort to some Big Question—usually rooted in the ideas of Adam Smith, Max Weber, or Karl Marx—to unify and enliven their work. In Merchants and Empire, Cathy Matson traces the development of New York from its origins as a small Dutch trading enclave to its mature status as a leading colonial port. She describes in rich detail the development of the city’s various commercial enterprises; she explicates the tangled history of economic regulation as it affected New York’s trading community; and she traces the careers of individual merchants as they struggled to make a place for themselves in the competitive and uncertain world of colonial commerce. But Matson’s book is framed by its own Big Question which is only loosely tied to its moorings in the quotidian details of trading patterns and career trajectories: were the merchants of colonial New York mercantilists or free traders? In particular, she wonders whether “lesser merchants support[ed] the commercial goals . . . that are closely identified with the commercial elite and political authority?” (p. 5). Matson returns to this question in a variety of contexts throughout the book, but her most general answer is to suggest that [End Page 650] England’s mercantilist policies usually benefitted, and were most consistently supported by, the city’s most prominent traders, who dominated the trans-Atlantic trade. Lesser traders, whose livelihoods were much more closely tied, according to Matson, to the coastal and West Indies trades and to regional marketing, were more likely to argue for free trade. These arguments generally failed, since they “came from the lesser merchants, who were most vulnerable in trade and least empowered in politics” (p. 7). Matson’s interest in theories of political economy and their relationship to merchant practices and government policy was anticipated in her earlier published work. 1 Merchants and Empire begins with an attempt to articulate this relationship. “Colonial American merchants,” Matson writes, “rarely engaged in consistent, systematic, and self-conscious reflection on their political economy, but patterns of economic thought can nonetheless be discerned. . . . [T]heir calculations with regard to the material comfort and welfare of their people were not ‘merely economic’ and therefore detached from values” (p. 5). Merchants, according to this formulation, began with practical and generally self-interested concerns, but moved gradually toward coherent codes of behavior and belief. The book consists of eight chapters. The first traces the establishment of New Amsterdam as a port; the last details the effects of the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath. In between, a pair of triptychs constitute the core of the book. Chapters two through four, each of which focuses on the period 1664 to 1700, treat transatlantic trade, the West Indies and coastal trade, and the growth of a regional economy in turn. Chapters five through seven are devoted to the same three topics, this time for the period from 1700 to 1760. From its earliest days as a remote outpost of the Dutch West India Company, New Amsterdam gave rise to a fractured and competitive community of merchants who fought with the “governor’s camp” to gain more liberal trading privileges...

Discovering the mercantile city in South Asia: the example of early nineteenth-century Calcutta

After examining the various geographical models of land use for the colonial port cities of Asia and the mercantile cities of North America, this paper argues that Bowden's mercantile triangle model has much to offer our understanding of the European part of Asian port cities. The model is applied to Calcutta and found to have considerable predictive value. Nevertheless, the Calcutta example suggests that the colonial state played a more important role in land use decisions than Bowden allows, and that the retail and hotel districts were considerably smaller than in North American cities. Furthermore, Bowden's ideas about a «city of the mind», based on London, influencing the naming and layout of colonial cities have little or no relevance to Calcutta.

Caste Conflict in South India in Early Colonial Port Cities—1650-1800

Caste Conflict in South India in Early Colonial Port Cities—1650-1800

“The Veracruz Merchant Community in Late Bourbon Mexico: A Preliminary Portrait, 1770-1810”

More than two decades of scholarship on colonial Mexico has established both the role and character of merchant class communities, especially in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Beginning with David A. Brading's seminal Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810, several additional studies now constitute a significant body of literature on the subject. Collectively, Brading, John E. Kicza, Doris M. Ladd and others have demonstrated how Mexico City merchants consolidated their fortunes by acquiring haciendas (landed estates). Moreover, their studies describe how Mexico City entrepreneurs maintained commercial hegemony by purchasing large quantities of European merchandise and then reselling it at grossly inflated prices. These businessmen monopolized colonial trade through extensive familial ties and trading networks extending back to Spain. Although these and other revelations are important with respect to Mexico City merchants, they neither explain the position nor the significance of entrepreneurs in the principal Spanish colonial port

Three Colonial Port Cities in India

Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta share a distinctive pattern of urban morphology that is part of their colonial past. Basic features are a nucleus with a Europeanstyle fort and open esplanade, segregated, residential areas for Europeans and Indians, a central business district, and peripheral military and manufactural zones. Evolution of these features varied in each city, and they survived largely intact until the early twentieth century. \M ADRAS, Bombay, and Calcutta are distinctive because they share similar morphological features that are a mixture of past European and Indian influences but that are not found in other Indian cities. British colonial influence on the Indian subcontinent was manifested in various settlement types, each of which was shaped by the circumstances of its origin and subsequent evolution. During the period of initial contact between England and India in the seventeenth century, the English East India Company, like other European trading enterprises, maintained commercial stations, called factories, in the preexistent Indian cities along the coasts and inland waterways. The early factories comprised warehouses enclosed in compounds together with dwellings for merchants and other facilities.1 Their effect on Indian urban structure was minor and ephemeral. In Madras and later in Bombay and Calcutta, fortified factories were erected at relatively undeveloped village sites, accessible to seagoing vessels and completely controlled by the East India Company. Hybrid towns arose at these three sites where Indian and other merchants, attracted by the commercial opportunities to be found under English protection, lived in a segregated fashion in or adjacent to the original European settlements. The three port towns served as the principal seats of English economic and military power on the subcontinent and were the bases for expansion inland.2 With the extension of British rule inland, other forms of colonial urbanism appeared during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most common types were the military and civil stations, known as cantonments and civil lines, that were usually established near indigenous urban centers but were administered separately.3 Hill stations were another new settlement ' A Historical Atlas of South Asia (edited by Joseph E. Schwartzberg; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), plate VI.B.5, 53, 209. 2 John E. Brush, The Growth of the Presidency Towns, Urban India: Society, Space and Image, Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southeast Asia, Monograph 10, edited by Richard G. Fox, Durham, N.C., 1970, 91-114. 3 Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976). * DR. KOSAMBI is a reader in sociology at the University of Poona, Pune, India. DR. BRUSH is an emeritus professor of geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:19:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Race and Residence in Colonial Port Elizabeth

Port Elizabeth was founded and developed as a British colonial port. Although designed as a White settler town it housed a population which became increasingly complex in ethnic composition during ...

The Early British Port Cities of India: Their Planning and Architecture Circa 1640-1757

The paper investigates the principal architectural considerations that governed the evolution of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, the three British colonial port cities of India, and seeks to answer the question of whether and to what extent these cities were planned. The extreme view in this debate on planning is taken by Sten Nilsson in his European Architecture in India, where he claims that the cities were based on strict symmetrical grid planning and were inspired by the Renaissance urban ideal, unlike traditional "organic" Indian cities. The paper questions this in view of the clear evidence that the British East India Company, unlike the French, was hostile to any ambitious urban planning on the part of the settlements. The hypothesis is further strengthened when one analyzes the ground plans of these cities, which show that defense considerations discouraged any symmetrical central planning, even though the streets were laid out in straight lines. In the absence of a central planning code, like the Royal Ordinance of 1573 for Spanish colonies, the building projects proceeded from the growing urban requirements of these settlements. The projects themselves were modest and defense naturally dominated building activities, mainly because these tiny enclaves were surrounded by hostile local and European powers. The growing needs of the inhabitants could not be neglected, however, and churches and hospitals came next in order of priority. The governors' mansions, on the other hand, had a position of peculiar importance in these port cities as they were meant to be a clear and visible symbol of authority. Not least interesting in these conurbations was the confluence of two traditions, Western and Eastern, though it must be added that the predominant style tended to be European, and mostly contemporary Tuscan. The conclusion reached is that while there was hardly any grandiose, symmetrical, total planning in these port cities, the city fathers did not neglect to make them habitable and even pleasant by developing gardens and parks in them.

The Iloilo General Strike: Defeat of the Proletariat in a Philippine Colonial City

In contrast to the rich historical literature on Southeast Asia's peasants, there are few studies of their urban counterparts, the proletariat of the colonial port cities. The region's rural revolts have inspired a growing literature on peasant politics and social history. But there has been little parallel research on the urban working class — stevedores, transport workers, and millhands.

Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The colonial port cities of Asia have recently attracted renewed attention not only from students of European imperial expansion, but also from others concerned with urban growth and change. These cities, founded by Europeans or developed by them as central links in worldwide colonial political and economic networks, stood apart from precolonial urban centers. Their foreign origins or control, their coastal locations, their central positions within European colonial systems, their emphasis on commercial rather than ritual activities, and their ethnic and cultural heterogeneity are important features which distinguish them from most indigenous cities in Asia. Many possessed a dual social and spatial structure, furthermore, which contrasted with the more unitary and often ritualized order of the noncolonial centers. Products of a changing political world order, these colonial cities became recognized centers of change in their own societies.

Changing Form and Function in the Ceremonial and the Colonial Port City in India: An Historical Analysis of Madurai and Madras

The city has usually been first of all a ‘place’—a clearly defined space visibly possessed and controlled by human beings and often sacred to their gods, a statement of man imposed upon the chaotic and threatening vastness of nature. It has represented the desire of man to master his own world, creating an environment reflecting his powers of reason, his desire for convenience and order, and his aesthetic predilection for beauty and meaningfulness in his surroundings.

The CSS Tallahassee : A Factor in Anglo-American Relations, 1864-1866

THECSS TALLAHASSEE: A Factor in Anglo-American Relations, 1864-1866 Mary Elizabeth Thomas It was August 1864, the fourth year of the War Between the States. Neutral nations which had granted belligerent status to the Confederate States of America were now questioning its ability to survive. Federal troops had advanced far into the Confederacy; the USS Kearsarge had recendy sunk the CSS Alabama; and United States ships were tightening the blockade of Confederate ports. Such was the situation when on the night of August 6 a new Confederate raider slipped past the United States ships at Wilmington, North Carolina and took a northward course. Not for long was it unnoticed. The Tattahassee, as the new ship was named, made a sudden and spectacular entrance on the war scene on August 11. Boldly operating off New York harbor, it inflicted damage so extensive as to create near havoc with the shipping of the area. Ships still in port were detained in order to avoid a probable encounter with this new and fast Confederate raider operating somewhere off Sandyhook. Estimates as to the number of ships actually captured, destroyed, or damaged by the Tallahassee within six days ranged at that time from thirtytwo to fifty-four, indicating perhaps the tremendous tension which it had created.' The location of the Tallahassee did not become known until August 18, when it arrived at the British colony of Nova Scotia, and the United States Consul at Halifax reported to Washington its presence in that harbor.2 Thereupon the Tallahassee became an object of international interest. Throughout the Civil War in North America, Great Britain had undertaken officially to maintain the strictest neutrality, a position sometimes made difficult by the belligerents' ships of war. Although overshadowed in history by the famous Alabama, this new Confederate, during its brief career late in the war, troubled Anglo-American relations, and raised questions in Britain as to obligations of a neutral nation and its colonies. 1 Official records give the following credits to the Talfohassee for the period Aug. 11-24: ships burned, 16; ships scuttled, 10; ships bonded, 5; ships released, 2: total, 33. OH, Ser. I, III, 703-704. 2 Lord Lyons to Earl Russell, no. 611, Washington, Aug. 19, 1864, Foreign Office 5/1094. 148 When Lord Lyons, the British Minister in Washington, sent his government an account of this new Confederate raider, he emphasized that within less than one week it supposedly had put fifty-four ships out of action. Moreover, according to United States newspapers, it was then in a British colonial port, Halifax, and coaling, presumably in order to continue its depredations on northern shipping. The people of the United States, wrote Lyons, were shocked by the success of the TaUahassee and had reacted vehemently against the inefficiency of their navy department. More important from the British point of view were the resentment and reproaches against Great Britain, regarded as sympathetic with the Confederate States. In fact, Secretary of State William H. Seward made plain to Lyons his displeasure because the TaUahassee had been permitted to call at Halifax, especially as a merchant there, a Mr. Keith, had recently ordered from New York a compass and some 3,000 barrels of pork—supplies Seward believed could be intended for no place except the Confederacy. Lyons found Seward convinced of Keith's role as a Confederate agent, and insistent upon the urgency of so warning officials in Nova Scotia. Lyons finally yielded to the pressure, and by coded telegram conveyed to the Nova Scotia executive Seward's information about Keith's purchases. In doing so, Lyons also observed to the colonial official that the United States government appeared to be quite disturbed by the visit of the TaUahassee to Halifax, a port which could serve as a coaling station for the raider.3 The arrival of the TaUahassee in the Nova Scotian port placed the executive of that British colony directly between the two North American belligerents. Shortly after the arrival of the Confederate ship, its captain, John Taylor Wood, called upon Lieutenant Governor Richard Graves MacDonnell who granted permission for the TaUahassee to take on a "reasonable" quantity of coal within the twenty...

Urban Growth and Municipal Development in the Colonial City of Madras, 1860-1900

Madras City, founded in the mid-seventeenth century, was the earliest colonial port city established by the British in India. Like the other port cities of Asia which were the creation of European powers, Madras functioned primarily as a base for overseas trade. As it grew and developed, its morphological and spatial patterns were dictated by the presence of a western population which at first was exclusively trade-oriented, but over the centuries became involved in banking, business and administration. As the British shifted from their role as traders to rulers of the Indian Subcontinent, they added a new dimension to the cities they created—a municipal apparatus to monitor urban growth, to regulate the use of land, and to insure that certain areas, especially those where they resided, would receive adequate urban facilities. The cities they founded had certain characteristics: each contained a large indigenous populace, far outnumbering the colonial elite that was effectively in charge of urban development. The residential areas of these urban dwellers were spatially segregated from those of the Europeans, and more densely populated. Indigenous and colonial life-styles determined the nature of settlement patterns and, in turn, molded the form of the built environment.