Cityscapes - Andrew Heath

The cant of empire echoes in studies of urban America. From Arthur Schlesinger Sr.’s “urban imperialism” to Kenneth Jackson’s “crabgrass frontier”, imperial metaphors have structured the way historians approach the city for nearly a century.1 More often than not they are little more than organizing tropes: a convenient shorthand for expressing patterns of metropolitan life, but nothing more.

When my research on the American city in both the antebellum and postbellum periods encountered imperial figures of speech, I began to wonder whether these metaphors were worth exploring further. The literature I explored suggested links between the nation’s western expansion and the way cities grew, as well as ideas about what they ought to look like, and how they should function. The optimism and anxiety empire-building engendered in citizens between the Mexican-American (1846-1848) and Spanish-American (1898) wars seemed interwoven into the fabric of the urban form and metropolitan culture in the United States. With imperialism very much on my mind – I wrote my dissertation proposal at the same moment U.S. troops marched into Iraq – it struck me that the rise of American empire and the emergence of the big city at the same historical moment might be more than a historical coincidence.     

As the convener of this roundtable suggests, there may be lessons to be taken from the work of Amy Kaplan. The parallels she draws between the rhetoric of manifest destiny and domesticity in antebellum American literature enabled her to find links between the frontier and the hearth. Referred to as “manifest domesticity,” Kaplan locates a discourse that blurred the boundaries between public and private spheres and gave women a vital role in the nation’s civilizing mission.2 Such an approach suggests the potential rewards for historians who look for traces of empire in unlikely places. Where Kaplan found empire in the homes of American citizens, others might locate it in their streets and built environments.

It is not entirely fair though to suggest that historians have not already been doing so for some time; for the student of the nineteenth and early twentieth century there is a rich literature on empire and the American city. Judd Kahn’s Imperial San Francisco, now thirty years old, argued that Progressive era boosters’ imperial ambitions underpinned their West coast urban designs. Since then, the likes of William Cronon, Eugene P. Moehring, Gary Brechin, Adam Arenson, and David Scobey have explored the ways in which empire has shaped the development of the American metropolis. Drawing on Kaplan’s method, meanwhile, Sheryl Streeby’s American Sensations analyzes the “double axis of city and empire” in nineteenth-century popular culture.3

Yet despite the richness of these studies no recognizable school has coalesced: it is not easy to identify a historiographic tradition exploring empire and the city in the way we can point to the New Urban History, for example, or the New Suburban History. This may owe something to accidents of academic production. Historians who might be working individually on questions that pertain to imperial urbanism have not had the big conference or influential edited collection that helps define them as a collective. It is striking, indeed, that the collaborative work that has come out on this theme tends to focus on British, French, or non-Western examples.4

But there is surely more at work here than factors purely internal to the academy, and I wonder whether historians have been paradoxically hurt by the richness of their work. The authors I cite above have used ‘empire’ to examine aspect of urban history as diverse as political economy, ecological transformation, the built environment, and social control, amongst other things. Taken together, their findings suggest how manifold approaches to empire can enrich our understanding of the city. We can see for example how ideas of civilization and savagery migrated easily from the Western frontier to the urban frontier; how cities extended markets and remade ecosystems; and how experiments in rebuilding European capitals shaped the way Americans thought about urban design and governance in their own metropolitan centers. There is an eclectic array of theoretical approaches here that echo the broader literature on colonialism: the neo-Marxist urban geography of David Harvey preferred by some, the postcolonial theory of Edward Said by others.5

I am loathe to privilege any one of these approaches over the others as I think each can cast into relief how both the process of imperial expansion and the ideology of empire have shaped aspects of the American city, but it is worth noting that works that draw together these disparate threads in a single setting – a Herculean task – are rare. David Scobey’s Empire City, a wonderfully rich study of Civil War era New York, certainly manages this, as does Jonathan Schneer’s London 1900.6 It is telling that the former is written very much in the vein of American Studies, while the latter takes a snapshot of the city at a particular moment and illuminates through forensic examination of institutions, places, and people a hitherto invisible imperial presence. Empire it seems is so embedded in the city, those larger ones of the Civil War and Progressive eras in particular, that the conventional chronological approach of the historian cannot always reveal its countless interconnections.    

The dynamics of academic production and the eclecticism of subject matter and theoretical approach then have left us with an imposing but fragmented literature on empire and the American city. In this way the field mirrors the patterns of American empire it takes as its subject. Like the American state, the American empire has never been a leviathan but rather an ever-shifting and often contested constellation of institutions, practices, and ideologies resting on a mixture of formal and informal power.7 While its decentered nature may make it harder to write a history of U.S. imperialism than some of its European counterparts, it makes it all the more imperative for urban historians to analyze empire in the metropolis. The field should embrace this challenge since the diffuse influence of empire extends well beyond the neo-baroque plan of Washington D.C.   

But how might this be done? First we should perhaps consider what we mean by empire: a term with a complex history in America. The definition of this roundtable – namely “control by one population or culture over the affairs and internal matters of another” – is a useful starting point. Yet, I think we need to ask in what ways the American city is imperial and who is actually doing the imperializing.

Identifying the subjects and objects of imperial power is therefore crucial and this historical context might lead us away from grand theorizing. New York I think can provide an instructive example. Gotham was an imperial city in 1770 and 1870 but in very different ways. Over the course of a century it was transformed from a place on the periphery of one empire – a colonized city that itself acted as an agent of colonization in subordinating African and Native-American populations – to the economic and cultural metropolis of another.8 Fast forward another hundred years and its imperial role was quite different yet again, though this time perhaps in terms of scale rather than kind as its hinterland attained global proportions. There are certainly continuities here for the historian to explore. As Lawrence Vale argues, there is a close relationship between the built environment and power in almost every urban setting. By exploring diverse sites of power, such as colonial court houses, Civil War era penitentiaries, and twentieth-century skyscrapers, we might be able to read the aspirations of empire-builders.9 We can look too at the patterns of domination, subordination, and resistance within the city as slaves, wild “Celts”, and new immigrants have been subject to surveillance and civilizing missions, which as Catherine Hall points out were “as necessary in Manchester as in Calcutta.”10 And of course we can trace the economic links that gave some New Yorkers power – whether formal or informal – over their own metropolis and more remote climes. But the meanings attached to empire, the identity of imperializers and imperialized, and the patterns empire left in urban space and society were subject to continual contestation and change.

There may be another lesson in New York as it illustrates how federalism complicates the American relationship between metropolis and empire. France had its imperial city in Paris and colonial cities like Algiers and Saigon; London was the center of the British Empire and the focal point for symbolic displays of power so richly explored in recent work. In contrast, the polycentric nature of the American nation, and the decision of the founders to locate political power in an insalubrious Maryland swamp, meant that American cities could harbor imperial ambitions of their own. Historiography itself reflects this through scholars’ application of imperial frameworks to not only D.C. and New York, but also San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago. The mid nineteenth-century battle between civic boosters to expand their city’s contado to the Mississippi Valley and Pacific – a kind of U.S. equivalent to the Scramble for Africa that was often framed in a rich imperial idiom – provides ample evidence of these aspirations. The practical consequences of such rivalries – the extension of public and private corporate power and the rapid growth of a transcontinental railroad network – remade not just cities but the nation itself. When Civil War era Americans spoke of imperial or empire cities they were usually referring to specific cities in competition with one another, even if they drew on tropes of American empire-building – especially manifest destiny – to do so. In the great era of continental conquest, imperial ambitions spurred competition between cities of the nation-state as each vied for supremacy.11

I wonder whether the nation-state can provide a complementary focus for urban historians. There is after all a definitional problem – one that is particularly acute in the American past – over at what point the nation ends and empire begins. Studies on the process of internal colonization have suggested the blurred boundaries between the two in other settings. While in the United States, western expansion was often understood by contemporaries as both the consolidation of the nation-state and the extension of benevolent imperial power.12 I am far from convinced that for my period at least these processes are separable.

Acknowledging this point may broaden the horizons for scholars of cities and empires. One of the most salutary trends in nineteenth-century urban history over the past decade or so has been the integration of urban and national history. Ignoring the cry in the 1990s for synthesis, historians have instead imaginatively found links between the development of city and nation through case-studies that shed light on both. In the work of Drew Einhorn and Sven Beckert we see ties between local and national political economy; Bruce Dorsey relates gendered cultures of urban reform to nation-building; while Margaret E. Farrar’s Building the Body Politic shows the common foundation to urban design and national construction in Progressive Era Washington D.C.13 Each study in very different ways reveals the potential rewards of locating national preoccupations in seemingly local phenomena and it only requires a minor conceptual shift to replace nation- with empire-building. To Dorsey indeed the terms are interchangeable. While in Beckert’s discussion of how in New York a Gilded Age bourgeoisie cast an industrial proletariat as “the other,” the influence of postcolonial theory on this seemingly nationally rooted literature is palpable.14    

I would like to conclude then by suggesting that we may know more about the relationship between American imperialism and the nation’s cities than we necessarily realize. But that is not to suggest that more work does not need to be done. While I am inclined to reject calls for an overarching theory of how empire has shaped the city – not least because of the protean nature of the empire in question – urban historians can learn (and have learnt) much from the insights of postcolonial literary theorists, practitioners of subaltern studies, architectural critics, scholars of state formation, and economists, as well as of course historians working on imperial and colonial cities beyond the United States. It is the eclecticism of the literature that these approaches have inspired that I think has made the field at once so exciting and so difficult to see. As more research is undertaken, and as the boundaries between empire and nation in American historiography become ever harder to define, I hope urban historians will overcome their partial blindness and recognize the myriad ways imperial practices and ideologies have left their mark on the city.

• 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. "The City in American History." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27, no. 1 (1940): 43-66; Kenneth T. Jackson. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• 2. Amy Kaplan. "Manifest Domesticity." American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581-606.
• 3. Judd Kahn. Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning in an American City, 1897-1906. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979; William Cronon. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991; Eugene P. Moehring. Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840-1890. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004; Gary Brechin. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; Adam I. Arenson. "City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877." (Ph.D., Yale University, 2008). David M. Scobey. Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002; Shelley Streeby. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. p. 5.
• 4. See for example Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds. Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
• 5. David Harvey. Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985 and The Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985; Edward W. Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
• 6. Jonathan Schneer. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• 7. I have been influenced here especially by William J. Novak. "The Myth of the 'Weak' American State." American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752-772.
• 8. For a recent study of New York as a city within the Early Modern British Empire see Carl H. Nightingale. "Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York." American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 48-71.
• 9. Lawrence J. Vale. Architecture, Power, and National Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• 10. Catherine Hall. "Cities of Empire." Journal of Urban History 27, no. 2 (2001): p. 193.
• 11. This is hardly a new discovery. It is well documented in New Deal era literature, including Schlesinger Sr. “City in American History” and Louis Hartz. Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1860. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948.
• 12. Michael Hechter. Michael. Internal colonialism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999.
• 13. Robin L. Einhorn. Property rules: political economy in Chicago, 1833-1872. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Sven Beckert. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Bruce Dorsey. Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; Margaret E. Farrar. Building the Body Politic: Power and Urban Space in Washington, D.C. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• 14. Dorsey. Reforming Men and Women. p. 8; Beckert, Monied Metropolis. p. 179.