Excerpt from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Alongside a twenty-first-century girdle of global cities, the language of colonial cities has also come back to life. In recent years, the Stanford University economist Paul Romer has made the case for 'Charter Cities'. 'My idea is to build dozens, perhaps hundreds, of cities, each run by a new partnership between a rich country and a poor country,' he has explained. 'The poor country would give up some land for the city, while a developed country like Britain or Canada could contribute a credible judicial system that anchors the rule of law.' Sound familiar? Romer is willing to admit that 'to some this sounds like colonialism'. But there is no need to worry. 'The developed partner country need not rule directly: residents of the city can administer therules, so long as the well-established judiciary retains the final say,just as the Privy Council does for some members of the Commonwealth.'24

If constructing a new generation of colonial cities might seem far-fetched, then what is happening in the former cities of the British Empire also strikes many critics as an unwelcome updating of discredited systems of colonial inequality.† The difference is that this time it is class rather than race shaping the urban fabric, as the segregation of the colonial period provides the antecedent for modern forms of apartheid now moulding the downtown districts, neighbourhoods and suburbs of postcolonial cities. Anthropologist and historian Mike Davis has condemned the restitution of 'older logics of imperial control' in developing cities. 'Throughout the Third World, postcolonial elites have inherited and greedily reproduced the physical footprints of segregated colonial cities,' he writes. 'Despite rhetorics of national liberation and social justice, they have aggressively adapted the racial zoning of the colonial period to defend their own class privileges and spatial exclusivity.'25

Similarly, in the cities of the metropole, the end of formal Empire has not meant the disappearance of colonial influence. The late Edward Said once asked, 'Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities; and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India or Algeria upon these two imperial cities?'26 So too with the port of Liverpool, the docks of Glasgow, the 'merchant quarter' of Bristol and the workshops of Birmingham. From the iconography of StGeorge's Hall, Liverpool, to Jamaica Street in Glasgow, to the funds supporting Matthew Boulton's Soho House in Birmingham, the lineages of Empire continue to find a resonance in the contemporary civic fabric.

Increasingly, the British are beginning to appreciate that imperialism was not just something 'we' did to other people overseas, but a long, complex process that transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. As Nicholas B. Dirks has argued, 'fundamental notions of European modernity–ideas of virtue, corruption, nationalism, sovereignty, economic freedom, governmentality, tradition, and history itself–derive in large part from the imperial encounter'.27 Once again, these transformations can be charted most obviously in our cities. In contrast to a barren conversation about Empire being a 'good' or 'bad' thing, we might reflect instead on how the processes of imperial exchange took place on these shores.

Not least because, as Prince Charles so painfully reflected, the final embers of Empire are almost extinguished. As a Member of Parliament, I see at first hand the uncomfortable realism of this position during the monthly ritual of parliamentary questions to the secretary of state for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While the architecture and iconography of the Palace of Westminster remain replete with the glories of Empire, question time is often little more than a rhetorical exercise in thwarted ambition: backbench Members of Parliament rise up demanding to know what Her Majesty's Government will 'do' about tensions in the South China Seas or the occupied West Bank or the situation in Kashmir, as if the despatch of a Palmerstonian gunboat was still a credible option. The bombast tends to deflate when ministers dutifully respond with some warm words about the role of the European Union or the United Nations, or spell out the stark limitations of Britain's military capacity. And when the British political class cannot have its way, its natural reflex point is a paroxysm of soul-searching about 'our place in the world'. In the summer of 2013, a dispute with Spain over border entry into the British territory of Gibraltar (on the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ceded the Rock to Great Britain) and the decision by the House of Commons not to support military intervention in Syria was immediately framed within the context of colonial loss and imperial retreat.

Excerpted from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt. Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.