As befitting a historian of imagination and literary skill, Hunt intersperses some references from contemporary novels into his historical descriptions. Thus William Jardine, the Scottish entrepreneur who founded Jardine, Matheson & Co, the Hong Kong trading house, is described by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1845 novel Sybil: "A Scotchman, richer than Croesus, one McDruggy, fresh from Canton, with a million opium in each pocket, denouncing corruption and bellowing free trade."
Jardine, an enterprising Scot who went to China and then made a fortune selling opium, is as archetypal figure of the Hunt view of empire as any other. Above all else, Jardine was a moneymaker. He used opportunities in China and Hong Kong to press a ruthless case for drug dealing. All of this fuelled the indignation of Karl Marx, who was always eager to see the ironies and contradictions of capitalism. The sight of British gunboats being used to force the Chinese to buy opium off British traders provoked howls of derision from the young Marx.
The particular object of Marx's scorn was Sir John Bowring, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham and laissez-faire economics. Bowring, in that typical mid-19th-century way, combined a strong commercial instinct with a powerful brand of evangelical Christianity. The somewhat absurd aphorism "Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ" has been attributed to him. You don't have to be Marx to see the irony of Bowring clutching the Bible in one hand and forcing opium down the throats of the Chinese with another.
As if conscious of an undue emphasis on trade and commerce, Hunt slips in a chapter on New Delhi towards the end of his wide-ranging book. This concentrates on the administrative aspects of empire. Lord Curzon, as Viceroy of India, is described in all his pomposity and grandeur. To Curzon, India was the "lynchpin of British imperial hegemony around the world". He implicitly believed in Britain's imperial destiny, to which he saw India as the key. "If we lose it (India) we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power". Hunt perhaps follows Lord Curzon in the belief that India was the central fact of the British Empire. It is striking that no fewer than three of his ten cities — Calcutta, Bombay and New Delhi — are in India, and a case could have been made for the inclusion of Khartoum, Cairo or even Lagos as illustrative cities of empire.
But all this is to cavil. The range of references is impressive. Hunt's line of attack is a very credible attempt to capture the spirit of empire in a single readable volume. He ends up in Liverpool, describing the urban unrest there in the early 1980s. This is clearly a nod to the well-observed notion that the Empire, with its consequent mass immigration into Britain, ended up affecting the home country as much as the colonies were affected by Britain. It was a two-way process, so the sight of black youths rioting in Toxteth in 1981 is seen by Hunt as an appropriate conclusion to the imperial story.
Despite the references to Marx, Hunt's progression through ten imperial cities seems to confirm the notion of history as being nothing more than "one damn thing after another". His book, however, is energetic and sensitive, without drawing any big conclusions. At the end, one becomes mindful of the old, rather cynical saying that the two greatest legacies of the British Empire were afternoon tea, and a vulgar expression not used in polite company.
Jardine, an enterprising Scot who went to China and then made a fortune selling opium, is as archetypal figure of the Hunt view of empire as any other. Above all else, Jardine was a moneymaker. He used opportunities in China and Hong Kong to press a ruthless case for drug dealing. All of this fuelled the indignation of Karl Marx, who was always eager to see the ironies and contradictions of capitalism. The sight of British gunboats being used to force the Chinese to buy opium off British traders provoked howls of derision from the young Marx.
The particular object of Marx's scorn was Sir John Bowring, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham and laissez-faire economics. Bowring, in that typical mid-19th-century way, combined a strong commercial instinct with a powerful brand of evangelical Christianity. The somewhat absurd aphorism "Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ" has been attributed to him. You don't have to be Marx to see the irony of Bowring clutching the Bible in one hand and forcing opium down the throats of the Chinese with another.
As if conscious of an undue emphasis on trade and commerce, Hunt slips in a chapter on New Delhi towards the end of his wide-ranging book. This concentrates on the administrative aspects of empire. Lord Curzon, as Viceroy of India, is described in all his pomposity and grandeur. To Curzon, India was the "lynchpin of British imperial hegemony around the world". He implicitly believed in Britain's imperial destiny, to which he saw India as the key. "If we lose it (India) we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power". Hunt perhaps follows Lord Curzon in the belief that India was the central fact of the British Empire. It is striking that no fewer than three of his ten cities — Calcutta, Bombay and New Delhi — are in India, and a case could have been made for the inclusion of Khartoum, Cairo or even Lagos as illustrative cities of empire.
But all this is to cavil. The range of references is impressive. Hunt's line of attack is a very credible attempt to capture the spirit of empire in a single readable volume. He ends up in Liverpool, describing the urban unrest there in the early 1980s. This is clearly a nod to the well-observed notion that the Empire, with its consequent mass immigration into Britain, ended up affecting the home country as much as the colonies were affected by Britain. It was a two-way process, so the sight of black youths rioting in Toxteth in 1981 is seen by Hunt as an appropriate conclusion to the imperial story.
Despite the references to Marx, Hunt's progression through ten imperial cities seems to confirm the notion of history as being nothing more than "one damn thing after another". His book, however, is energetic and sensitive, without drawing any big conclusions. At the end, one becomes mindful of the old, rather cynical saying that the two greatest legacies of the British Empire were afternoon tea, and a vulgar expression not used in polite company.
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