Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World

Hunt (history, Univ. of London; Marx's General) provides a far-ranging history of the British Empire from the 1600s to the 1900s via chapter-long sketches of ten of the empire's most important cities, including Boston; Bridgetown, Barbados; Dublin, Ireland; Cape Town, South Africa; Hong Kong, China; Melbourne, Australia; Liverpool, England, and three cities in India: Bombay, Calcutta, and New Delhi. The author attempts to find the middle ground among those who champion empire (Niall Ferguson's Empire) and those who disparage it (Richard Gott's Britain's Empire). He succeeds in bringing his metropolises to life, in part with descriptions of bygone "streets and squares, sewers and monuments, architecture and corporations" but also with reference to present-day landmarks. Some may lament the absence of references to Lewis Mumford's The City in History and wish for a concluding chapter to better tie together Hunt's urban stories of the growth and decline of the British Empire in the 20th century.