cityscapes - Bender

Why have historians of urban America not considered themes related to imperial ambitions?  First, I would say that such blindness is not unique to US urban historians. Those historians who have written about the transformation of European cities and the emergence of metropolitan life in them—architectural historians in particular—do not connect the vast increase of resources to the formal colonies and the extraction of wealth by means of a free trade imperialism from less developed parts of the world, so-called informal colonialism. The architectural historians referenced by the convener of this roundtable, including Gwendolyn Wright, Lawrence Vale, Zeynep Çelik, and Nezar AlSayyad, have focused on the architecture of empire, but an equally important question to explore is the imperial architecture of the metropole. Oddly, the word imperial is often used in reference to the neo-classical architecture of European and American cities at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, while imperial connections pertaining to the social, economic, and even cultural history of the metropole are largely omitted. Second, in the American case recognition of imperialism and empire in everyday life has been ignored by most subfields until very recently. Empire was sanitized as “westward expansion.”

There is also a general disconnect between the study of American international activity and domestic activity. William Appleman Williams, who did make the connection, made it with agriculture and a Jeffersonian tradition of empire. The split is furthered by the American tradition of exceptionalist thinking--which denies both empire and class. Even debates about empire are contained continentally.  We ask ourselves whether we are doing the right thing, but it is entirely self-referential. We do not factor in what is happening at the other end. It is all we, so the imperial nature of our activity in the world is domesticated in a way that blocks what goes on beyond our borders.

As I have already suggested, the biggest thing missing from urban historiography is the importance of empire in drawing money to the metropole. Here some cities are more relevant than others.  San Francisco accumulated significant resources as the metropole for US Pacific imperial interests. New York profited more globally. And in both cases the result is an exceptionally strong financial sector because of the pattern of American empire after the fiasco of the Philippines and the turn to financial “missionaries.”  Wars of empire have had a huge impact on cities.  There has been some scholarship on this, but war production and military bases and military research has transformed cities and regions.  One of the reasons California schools were so strong in the 1950s was the federal assistance they received on a per capita basis to accommodate children of defense related workers, which was a huge percentage of workers in the state, particularly the Bay Area, San Diego, and LA.

There is a global system of cities, and the domesticity of our approach to urban history misses that. There is a lot of discussion of the internal hierarchy of cities, but the global hierarchy is very important for both the flow of capital and migrants,  which are or should be big themes (or should be) in urban history. In fact, there is an interesting tension between the logic of nations and cities that would warrant exploration. Cities require open borders for their success—the more people, things, ideas, and money that passes through them, the more they thrive.  Nations, as sovereigns, tend to be protective of borders. There are different interests at work here.  Whatever global history there is in the modern era is managed by cities. Cities, even inland ones like Chicago, are connected (as W. Cronon has shown) to world markets. We need more than trade statistics, we need maps of the networks of cities inside and beyond national borders, and we need to distinguish between mutually beneficial and exploitative networks. Long ago, Saskia Sassen suggested that global immigration patterns emerge after and in the same channels as capital, though in the opposite direction, from colony (formal or informal) to the metropole. That is worth studying historically.

Several years ago, when globalization seemed to be located in cities, I thought that cities might significantly change their position in relation to nations.  The rise of the modern nation-state was a triumph over cities. It is noteworthy that the word city does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, and cities are legally not political units but rather administrative units of the states. That is why they must get permission from the state legislatures for so many local policies. I thought that the example of Singapore, Hong Kong (after the “hand over”), and the re-emergence of Shanghai might be an indicator that the triumph of nations over cities in the early modern and modern period might be tempered, making for a new perspective of cities.  I am not so sure any more that such a transformation is underway.  But I think for those of us who are interested in transnational and global approaches to U.S. history, it is important to recognize how much of what we call global or transnational is mediated by cities. And this has an unstudied impact on cities, and gives cities a role (also unstudied) in the transnational processes that are increasingly of interest.  This is especially true in the cultural domain (and historians might try to explore the relations of cities to some of the ideas about the circulation of culture in the work of Arjun Appadurai) and the economy. This might be the place to revive the long abandoned but vital subfield of economic history.

As suggested by my interest in more empirical work than the Pease/Kaplan approach, interesting though it is, and broader considerations than architectural or planning historians offer, I think we historians can do what we have always done. Beg, borrow, and steal ideas and data, but do our own work, as we seem to have the widest possibilities.