GUHP Newsletter Special Edition II

Global Urban History Summer Continues: the Leicester Conference

vol. ii, issue 4, july 29, 2019

Reflections on “The Pursuit of Global Urban History,” the conference co-organized by GUHP and the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, UK, July 10-12, 2019

Carl Nightingale, GUHP Coordinator, University at Buffalo, Reflection in the Form of a Thank-You Letter

Gil Shohat, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, “Reflections”

Celia Mirales Buil, Universidade de Lisboa, “Reflections”

Seamus O’Hanlon, Monash University, “Reflections”

Darinee Alagirisamy, University of Hong Kong, “Between Many Worlds: Poverty and Urban Life in Britain’s Asian Empire”

Jake Christopher Richards, University of Cambridge, “African Urban Space”

**Before launching into the Reflections, Note this Call for Papers from our colleague Maarten van Dijck at Erasmus University Rotterdam on Unequal Access to Early Modern Urban Institutions, a Main Session for the EAUH Conference in Antwerp in August 2020.** 

Carl Nightingale, Reflections in the Form of a Thank You Letter

Leicester, UK, July 2019

Dear GUHP members and prospective members:

Since the GUHP-CUH conference in Leicester earlier this month, I have received many very kind well-wishes and expressions of gratitude from conference goers. In return, it’s only appropriate that I frame my own summary and reflections on the conference as a thank you letter to everyone who made the event into such a success for me, and I gather, so many of you who were there.

Thanks first to the combined GUHP-CUH Organizing Team, starting with dynamic duo of Denise Herckey-Jarosch in Buffalo and Sally Hartshorne in Leicester. Their transatlantic relationship, entirely conducted by email, ensured the smoothest of connections between GUHP’s new conference registration system, which was the work of Denise, and CUH’s splendid handling of local arrangements, Sally’s bailiwick. Thanks too to Sally for the keepsake conference program, which will surely go down as one of GUHP’s key founding documents.

To Simon Gunn, Director of the Centre for Urban History and Honorary Chair of the Organizing Team, and to Prashant Kidambi, Simon’s colleague at CUH and our indefatigable Master of Ceremonies for the affair: Thanks so much for the original invitation, way back in January 2018, to Leicester, for the chance to explore high points of the city and for dinner at Kayal, easily the pinnacle of the city’s global urban restaurants, and for your gracious hospitality in John Foster Hall at Oadby. The venue itself was a marvelous example of the ways well-designed spaces can help coax intellectual synergies into roaring flame. The close proximity of lodgings, presentation rooms, the lunchroom, the tea-break room, and the bar created a family-reunion like warmth that added to the intellectual energy of the event. You also did a great job keeping the local weather in line!

Simon and Prashant played important roles on the program committee, which also consisting of Emma Hart, Michael Goebel, Joseph Prestel, Kristin Stapleton, and myself. Thanks to all for your labors on the program that stretched from last November through inevitable last minutes shifts in July. Out of that work, the Committee brought to life the 26 panels and 84 presentations that will go down in as this conference’s foundational contribution to “conversations at the intersection of urban history and global history.” Many conference-goers praised the 1 h 45 minute session formats for allowing deep unrushed discussion—thanks for that is due to Michael Goebel, who also brought you the nice long tea breaks,. Thanks to all and to other GUHP veterans Rosemary Wakeman, Lynn Hollin Lees, Isabel dos Guimãres Sá, Janna Coomans, Nikhil Rao, and Gergely Baics for jumping in as panel chairs.

Substantively, the program contained papers on cities from every continent in a refreshingly equal mix. Panels of paper on single regions “in global perspective” mingled judiciously alongside thematic panels containing papers on cities in a variety of regions. I hope these latter inspire us all to take on the GUH challenge to read widely across area-study boundaries. Port cities, as Seamus O’Hanlon reports below, were star topics, but so were colonial cities, capitals, “petroleum cities,” and big cities with some relationship to the concept of “global city.” Yet so were small and inland cities--as Ute Merkel put it “Not-Tokyos” like Lacrosse, Wisconsin, towns in Cumbria, and Sandakan, North Borneo. Comparative papers on cities in distinct regions made a strong appearance, such as Nikhil Rao’s on Berlin and Bombay. “Connective” analysis involving long-distance circuits of some kind was inherent to many of the port, petroleum, and colonial cities, but also included surprising revelations such as Essi Lamberg on Finland and Tanzania, and Joseph Prestel’s on East Berlin and Palestine. Some colonial city papers included riveting examples of cities wrapped up in Italian, Spanish, and German imperial adventures that have received limited attention, or places like Tetouan that involved overlapping imperial claims, and places like the Cyrenaica where Italian settler colonialism was in many ways an extension of early settlement schemes on the Italian peninsula itself. There were also two panels that highlighted the theme of decolonization and cities in colonial peripheries and metropoles—one involving nationalist movements, the other a “decolonization” the art history of Paris. A special welcome to our colleagues from the history of science programs of Universities in Barcelona and Lisbon who used the conference to give their analysis of “knowledge in transit” a spatial grounding in cities. Synthetic themes ranged from questions of informality and “unintended cities,” to commodity networks, and “planetary urbanization.” All of these also bear witness to an attraction to GUH from a variety of disciplines, a trend that is very marked in the profiles of GUHP’s membership more broadly, and that was reflected by interventions of geographers Christian Schmid and Loretta Lees as well as Sophia Basaldua-Sun, a scholar of literary Buenos Aires, New York, and Paris. Even more importantly, they bear witness to the sheer multiplicity of questions and approaches that GUH can help stimulate. One important limitation was chronological: though there was a substantial portfolio of papers on early modern topics, the lone medievalist at the conference Taylor Zaneri rightly called on GUHP to more deliberately reach out to networks of scholars working on global medieval and global classical rubrics. GUHP Board Member Emma Hart readily agreed and committed to get on this task right away!

Warm thanks to all presenters for what many of you involved serious investments in time and money to make it to the conference! As expected from the conference location, scholars stationed at European universities (though with origins worldwide) were especially well represented—and not only nearby but from Helsinki to Porto, with an especially strong contingent from the Iberian Peninsula. By switching continents for future conferences, we hope to shake that up even more, as we did with some success in San Juan last month. It is also important to note that visa issues presented problems for scholars coming from farthest away and from countries where British consulates and their contractors clearly do not serve scholars well. That said, especial thanks to our jet-set champions from Melbourne, Wellington, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Cape Town. To Duncan Money from Bloemfontein and Eric Makombe from Harare, thanks for beaming in by Skype.

Perhaps most gratifying and hopeful to GUH in the long term was the conference’s large contingent of graduate students and recent Ph,Ds. You know who you are. As you also know well, you intervened fearlessly, repeatedly, and professionally both in formal presentations and in discussions. I can speak for myself in saying that while I partook in many great conversations at the conference, I will remember your contributions the most. Thanks for that great gift, and for the post-conference reflections some of you sent in. These appear below.

Note that many of the emerging scholars came to Leicester with assistance from GUHP’s Travel Award program. Travel Awardees will be writing blog entries in upcoming months and have contributed to this Newsletter. Travel Awards are made possible by the modest membership dues that GUHP charges and are in fact the main reason we charge these fees. Do remember this when membership renewals come up in January 2020! And thanks to all for your support.

My last thanks go to two eminent scholars who came from outside GUH to join us at Leicester, leaving us all with lots to think about. Professor Christian Schmidt from ETH Zurich, one of the architects with Neil Brenner of planetary urbanization theory, asked us to explore seven theses that explode our notion of the urban to encompass all “processes of urbanization,” both concentration of built environments in what we know as cities but also extensions of built environments required by these concentrations that now cover and impact the planet as a whole. For those eager to know more about Schmid’s work but who were unable to come to the seminar he and I organized for the conference, I can easily provide you with some samples of his work (email cn6@buffalo.edu). I thank Christian not only for an effervescent presentation at the seminar, but for his eager and tireless commitment to the conference more generally--in informal conversations with many of us afterward, and in interventions during panels. Professor Schmid, we look forward to more collaborations in the future!

Last but not least, thanks to Professor Sunil Amrith for his lyrical and deeply challenging keynote address on port cities and global environmental history. None of us will forget the image that served as the beginning and end of his address, from artist Tiffany Chung’s “River Project” (2010) challenging us to deepen our understandings of the relationship between cities and water--rivers and estuaries. Professor Amrith’s basic theme, that the history of the built environment cannot be written separate from the history of the planetary environment as a whole resonated deeply with Professor Schmidt’s work.

Both also sent us all gentle reminders to grow bolder in our synthetic imaginations, a theme that resurfaced at the conference’s final plenary panel. There is no gold standard for what makes Urban History “Global.” Yet “the Pursuit of Global Urban History” certainly allows us, if it does not spur us, to open our minds exactly to the bigger questions Schmid and Amrith were asking.

Gil Shohat, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, “Reflections”

The core aim of the conference was to deepen and foster the discussion between two fields of historical scholarship: global and urban history. The conference program promised an exciting variety of different approaches to this methodologically challenging crossroads: studies of single cities with a global outlook were equally well represented as comparative approaches to the historicizing of synchronic developments across time and space.

A core thread of discussion was certainly the aspiration to globalize urban history by putting seemingly distinctive phenomena into broader perspective in order to arrive at overarching and thus potentially more historical explanations. For instance, it was Michael Goebel in the first panel on “Historicizing Global Cities” who made a plea to transcend area specific histories of segregation in order to effectively contextualize the compatibility of phenomena such as “segregation” and “cosmopolitanism”. Referring to numerous case studies such as Manila and New York, Goebel made the case for comparing cities to one another in order to actually foreground the peculiarities of local specifics in the global age of steam.

However, not only cities as such, but also individuals as transmitters of knowledge across borders and city boundaries were analytically framed within a global urban methodology. Taking, for instance, the discourse on Zoology and Zoos at the twilight of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into consideration, Oliver Hochadel utilized the theoretical approach of the “inter-urban-matrix” (N. Wood) in order to showcase how a number of Zoologists connected with a globally oriented audience.

My own presentation on “Anticolonial Encounters. London, the Left and Decolonization, 1930s-1960s”, which focused on the potentials and risks of surveillance material of the British Security Service for a global urban history of anti-colonial activism, was embedded within a thought-provoking panel that foregrounded the role of the metropolis as incubators of anti-imperial and anti-colonial activism. In it, Joseph Ben Prestel made the case for including East-Berlin into our purview when examining globally entangled Palestinian activism in the 1970s. By localizing Palestinian activism since 1967 in East and West Berlin, for instance by highlighting the fact that most Palestinian activists from the arrived in West Germany via East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport, Prestel furthermore emphasized the necessity of writing the history of Cold-War-Berlin as an entangled history. George Roberts, on the other hand, by reflecting on his recently completed doctoral thesis on the role of Tanzanian capital Dar-es-Salaam as a hub of anti-colonialism after independence from the British Empire in 1961, emphasized the role of capital cities of newly independent states in the search for new concepts of world-making. Roberts, however, also underlined the necessity to dig deeper when it came to explaining the encounters of activists in the city, correctly pointing out that we should not make do with simply reiterating encounters, conferences or demonstrations as such. Rather, it was our task to excavate what actually underpins the events themselves, despite too many historical accounts that take the routinized gathering of activists from manifold spheres for granted.

Thanks to the engaged conversation in the aftermath of our presentations, e.g. on the epistemological potential of tracing the developments in mobility from the “global 1930s” to the “global 1960s”, and Michael Goebel’s remarks on the shakiness of the term “anti-imperialism”, as well as very friendly atmosphere tout court during the conference, I drew considerable inspiration from my first presentation at an academic conference. I can only agree with the overwhelming majority of the conference presenters in their desire to continue the conversation on the methodological viability of globalizing urban history as well as of the urbanization of global history, preferably by means of successive theme-oriented workshops in order to effectively carve out the foundational cornerstones for our next big conference, to which I very much look forward. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the conference organizers at the GUHP as well as at the School of Urban History at the University of Leicester (notably Sally Hartshorne for her tireless efforts) for inviting me to the conference as well as for the Travel Award. It made my trip to Leicester a highly memorable one.

Celia Mirales Buil, Universidade de Lisboa, Reflections

Port cities have been omnipresent in the conference (that’s why I became interested in GUH in the first place). For the future: how to extend the reflection beyond, to medium or small cities located in the hinterland?

Other main themes to connect global and urban are mobilities: migration/commerce/knowledge circulations. If the connection between migration studies and segregation in cities is now clear for me thanks to the conference, I think other connections could be studied in future workshops. Interurban Knowledge is now an active sub-field in urban history of sciences for instance, although not very well defined yet, in my opinion. Mobilities also include non-humans: germs, pollutants, etc.

I didn’t participate in the Seminar on Planetary Urbanization, but environmental aspects (“sharing earth”) could be an issue to explore. It also permits to think in inequalities at all scales: cities are responsible for the greatest polutions, developed cities consigned polluting activities in less-developed spaces…

In terms of methods: What is the city’s agency in GUH? What do global historians do with the city? Are they using the city as a tool to explain something global or are they saying something about the city itself? Same question for urban historians: what urban historian does with the global context? The diversity of answers to these questions during the conference was inspiring to me.

Sources are, in my opinion, an important topic to explore in these workshops you want to organize. What sources could we use to perform this “global to local” analysis? How can we compare sources produced in so different contexts? (Maybe this comment has much to do with my French urban historian background).

Seamus O’Hanlon, Monash University, “Reflections”

I thought this was an excellent conference that clearly articulated the field of Global Urban History - and its necessity. I was particularly impressed by the contributions of emerging scholars, especially those whose work focuses on the Global South. The emphasis on migration and movement between the South the North and around various hubs in the Global South was also fascinating. In particular I found the diffusion of ideas along networks of colonial administrators, business people and political figures enlightening. I was also impressed by the work of emerging scholars seeking to uncover global trends in planning and urban design.

There is clearly an emerging method and form to Global Urban History, however as I mentioned in the plenary session at the end I do have some concerns about sources. As with Global History more generally there is a danger that depth can be sacrificed for breadth. In seeking to uncover global trends and experiences the most readily-accesible sources for historians to find and mine tend to be official, whether government, colonial or business-related, rather than the more ethnographic sources pertaining to the daily lives of the inhabitants of urban spaces which became popular in urban history in the 1990s. As someone who was trained in the methods and sources of social history and later cultural history, I worry that our over-reliance on these official sources might take as back to a form of 'history from above'. As the field develops we may need to ensure that we don't sacrifice depth of knowledge about single or several urban places for breadth of knowledge about a larger number.

Darinee Alagirisamy, University of Hong Kong, Reflections on Panel entitled “Between Many Worlds: Poverty and Urban Life in Britain’s Asian Empire, c. 1880s-1937”

Our panel comprised three paper presentations. Michael Sugarman, University of Bristol, spoke about the vital role that water systems played in hygiene and sanitation programmes, as well as more broadly, city ‘improvement’ efforts. Sugarman pointed out that urban planning in colonial Rangoon and Singapore cannot properly be discussed without reference to these efforts and their correlation with pressing concerns of urban poverty. Arnab Chakraborty, University of York, discussed the delicate balancing act that developed between the colonial state and urban elites as they came to terms with healthcare in ‘impoverished’ Madras. Darinee Alagirisamy, University of Hong Kong, spoke about the transnational toddy menace which spanned colonial Madras and the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore as a site on which very many urban anxieties collided and converged in the interwar era. Nikhil Rao of Wellesley College was our Panel Moderator.

As we brainstormed and planned our panel ahead of the Global Urban History Conference, we quickly realised that we had among us very many ideas and approaches that drew on our respective areas of specialisation. One overarching theme in particular stood out in our discussions and seemed to encompass what all of us were working towards: poverty. We realized that in one way or another, our research projects were all concerned with the ways in which urban poverty was perceived, articulated, managed, and negotiated across Britain’s Asian empire in the context of late colonialism. How did Britain’s Asian empire inform the ways in which  poverty was managed in an urban context? How did reformist discourses and practices in certain urban contexts - in the metropole, in the Western world, and in other cities around Asia - shape the ways in which poverty was understood and approached in colonial cities? We sought to address, or at the very least, unpack these questions in our respective papers. As a panel, we committed to emphasizing certain broad continuities and points of departure from our projects that are pertinent to the dynamic field of global urban history.                    

Our paper presentations surfaced several broad points of interest. Of these, one that is particularly striking was that we all challenged the extent to which reform-minded elites acted as agents of change in British Asia between the 1880s and 1937. Sugarman made the argument that water and its management took a life of its own; one that far outweighed elite efforts at shaping the contours of urban life in colonial Rangoon and Singapore. Alagirisamy emphasized that the colonial state often had more in common with working-class drinkers where alcohol and its control were concerned than did middle-class reformers, who often sought the complete prohibition of toddy production and consumption. Arnab Chakraborty shared that reformist elites were not as in control of urban improvement programmes as has previously been argued as they found their efforts frequently hamstrung and frustrated by circumstances that largely operated beyond their control. Other interesting points of discussion that came up during the Question and Answer session include the role of the rural in shaping imaginings of the urban, and the global connections that we could extrapolate from our respective papers.

Jake Richards, University of Cambridge, Reflections on panel entitled “African Urban Space: The Global and the Local in Urban History”

This exciting panel comprised papers by Laura Channing on Freetown’s urban economy in the early nineteenth century, Samuel Grinsell on port cities in the imperial Nile Valley in the late nineteenth century, Idalina Baptista on electrification in colonial Maputo (Lourenço Marques) in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, and Tim Livsey on Government Reservations in Nigeria during late colonialism (c. 1930s-1960). In spanning the African continent, the papers addressed some major questions in global urban history: the roles of imperialism and colonialism in structuring cities, the interplay of commercial, literary, and infrastructural dimensions of urban spaces, and how African peoples shaped and challenged urban transformation rather than being presented as its victims.

 Laura Channing’s paper, co-authored with Bronwen Everill, challenges the typical representation of colonial Sierra Leone as a peasant-export economy. In reality, it was a Black settler colony, with a dense population in and around Freetown. Sierra Leone was settled by various freedpeople including Black Loyalists from the American War of Independence, Nova Scotians, and slaves recaptured from the transatlantic trade by the British Navy. This varied population created market demand for many goods from Africa and the Americas. The Napoleonic Wars (c. 1803-1815) increased the naval and military presence in the colony, creating additional demand for goods and services. From 1794, the Sierra Leone Company permitted settler women to obtain licences to trade. Using their profits from market trading, women bought boarding houses to rent out to visiting sailors, and retail shops to supply these growing markets. Women were also consumers of Atlantic products. It thus makes more sense to view women as part of the formal economy of production, consumption, and wage-earning beyond subsistence living, rather than as enslaved domestic workers.

Samuel Grinsell’s paper compared Alexandria and Port Said during the period of British supremacy in Egypt from 1882 onwards. Alexandria was an ancient city to the west of the Nile delta whereas Port Said was a new port city to the east of the delta, created in 1859 as part of the construction of the Suez Canal. In the nineteenth century, Alexandria was a polyglot city, with various Mediterranean and northern European groups. Poets such as C. P. Cavafy celebrated this variety. Although Port Said’s grid-like structure was modelled on Alexandria, it did not inspire such literary celebrations. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling bemoaned that ‘there is iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said.’ Port cities on the same delta could inspire very different reactions.

Idalina Baptista’s paper demonstrated that electrification was embedded within the idea of a ‘good city’ in Lourenço Marques c. 1870-1910. This included street lighting, indoor lighting, and electric tramways. Before the 1870s, Lourenço Marques had a small population and its marshy land made it vulnerable to malaria. However, the boom in diamond and gold mining in the Transvaal prompted Boer, British, Portuguese, French and German competition to control the region for shipping interests. In the 1890s, a concession for electrification was handed to a jack-of-all-trades German firm. By 1904, the concession had passed to more specialized firms, with the construction of a second power station for tramways handed to the Delagoa Bay Transport Corporation. This firm demonstrated how transoceanic, regional, and urban scales came together. Its shareholders were Portuguese, German, South African, and British; its regional business interests included recruiting Mozambican workers for South African mines; and its municipal contracts also involved water piping systems. The trams provoked urban controversy when white settlers complained about riding in the same carriages as Black Africans.

Tim Livsey’s paper picked up the story of racial segregation in African cities by studying the Government Reservation of Ikoyi, in Lagos, Nigeria. The Government Reservation, also called a European Reservation, was a zone defined by the British colonial government for housing colonial officials and white expatriates. Its typical features were bungalows, low density residential patterns, and better utilities than those available to the African population. Livsey situated the Government Reservation in the context of late colonialism, a term that tends to refer to the period c. 1945-1960 when colonial policymakers increasingly adopted developmentalist paradigms, resulting in the need for more staff on the ground to implement these policies.

In fact, Livsey’s paper extended the periodization and conceptual nuance of late colonialism. Government Reservations demonstrated that late colonialism had spatial dimensions as well as policy ones. Such spaces were contested much earlier than 1945. Since the founding of Government Reservations, male African domestic servants were permitted to live in bunker accommodation at the back of each bungalow plot. However, they often smuggled their families into the accommodation, resulting in occasional complaints by white settlers but little attempt to remove them. From the 1930s, elite Africans demanded access to state resources channelled into the Government Reservations. C. C. Adeniyi-Jones and others campaigned in the Press and Legislative Council, resulting in the reservations being renamed ‘Government Reserved Areas’ in , 1938 thereby removing explicit racial categorization.

A stimulating discussion followed these four excellent presentations. Audience members asked about commodity flows, including foodstuffs, that provisioned cities such as Freetown. Panelists considered what it might mean to write the history of African port cities from the perspective of being at the end of internal trade routes, rather than facing the ocean. Another route of inquiry concerned conceptualizing power: does it make more sense to see power as hegemonic, negotiated, contested, or capillary in urban spaces? Such questions provoked a wider discussion about the politics of knowledge production about ‘Africa’. How might global urban history convene panels and workshops that either had a stronger sub-regional focus within the continent, or put African cities into conversation with cities on other continents? These questions raise promising future avenues of inquiry for scholars who work in African history, urban history, global history, and in the productive spaces where these three fields intersect.