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

None of this means that Empire as a global force has ended. If the formal dominion of the old European empires has indeed faded, competing nations have emerged to fill the vacuum. In the twenty-first century, it is China and India who are on the rise, dictating a broader pivot in world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific–both of them exerting geopolitical ambition and challenging the remnants of Anglo-American hegemony. One of the undercurrents in this book is the playing out of this uneasy transition, from a decaying colonial legacy to the assertive impact of emerging nations in former cities of Empire. For the myriad ways in which cities restore or erase, condemn or commemorate their colonial pasts is itself another stage in the compelling and continuing history of Empire.

* A visit to the landmark 'Road to Regeneration' exhibition at Beijing's National Museum of China clarifies any doubt about the central place of the Opium Wars and the loss of Hong Kong in the Communist Party narrative of contemporary China's progress. 'After Britain started the Opium War in 1840, the imperial powers descended on China like a swarm of bees, looting our treasures and killing our people,' reads the official account. 'They forced the Qing government to sign a series of unequal treaties that granted them economic, political and cultural privileges and sank China gradually into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society.' The anti-imperialist struggle was the beginnings of China's 'search for a path to salvation [in Maoist socialism]'.

† Partha Chatterjee has suggested the revival of colonial themes in postcolonial countries is itself the broader product of a new era of technocratic elitism. 'We are being told that it is a sign of our growing self-confidence as a nation that we can at last acknowledge, without shame or guilt, the good the British did for us,' he wrote in 2005. 'I suspect it is something else. The more popular democracy deepens in India, the more its elites yearn for a system in which enlightened gentlemen could decide, with paternal authority, what was good for the masses. The idea of an Oxford graduate of 22 going out to rule over the destiny of 100,000 peasants in an Indian district can stir up many noble thoughts in middle-class Indian hearts today.' See Partha Chatterjee, 'Those Fond Memories of the Raj', in Empire and Nation (New York, 2010).


Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt



Introduction

On a sharp winter's day in December 2010, the Hong Kong Association and Society held its annual luncheon in London's Hyde Park. The venue, of course, was the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, part of the Jardine Matheson group, perched lucratively amidst the billionaires' playground of Knightsbridge, and all the great tai-pans of British corporate life were in attendance. However, the Association's guest of honour was not some old China hand, flown in from the Hong Kong Club, to wax lyrical about Britain's 'easternmost possession'. Instead, it was the tall, suave and studiously loyal ambassador of the People's Republic of China, His Excellency Mr Liu Xiaoming.

In syrupy diplomatese, Beijing's man in London spoke rhapsodically of the 'Pearl of the Orient' and the achievements of British business in building up the colony, and then reaffirmed his government's commitment to the vision of Hong Kong proclaimed by Deng Xiaoping: one country, two systems. Communist China would not impose 'Mao Zedong thought' on Hong Kong. Instead, it was determined to preserve freedom of speech, the rule of law, private property rights and, above all, the low-tax, free-trade model that underpinned the once-imperial city's prosperity. The future of this 'international city' was as a global finance centre and, for British companies, as a bridge to mainland China. A pleasing statement of business as usual, the message was smartly tailored to the merchant princes of the Mandarin Oriental.

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.