by ROBERT ROSS and GERARD J. TELKAMP I In a sense, cities were superfluous to the purposes of colonists. The Europeans who founded empires outside their own continent were primarily concerned with extracting those products which they could not acquire within Europe. These goods were largely agricultural, and grown most often in a climate not found within Europe. Even when, as in India before 1800, the major exports were manufactures, in general they were still made in the countryside rather than in the great cities. It was only on rare occasion when great mineral wealth was discovered that giant metropolises grew up around the site of extraction. Since their location was deter mined by geology, not economics, they might be in the most inaccessible and in convenient areas, but they too would draw labour off from the agricultural pursuits of the colony as a whole. From the point of view of the colonists, the cities were therefore in some respects necessary evils, as they were parasites on the rural producers, competing with the colonists in the process of surplus extraction. Nevertheless, the colonists could not do without cities. The requirements of colonisation demanded many unequivocally urban functions. Pre-eminent among these was of course the need for a port, to allow the export of colonial wares and the import of goods from Europe, or from other parts of the non-European world, in the country-trade as it was known around India.

‘At the centre of the world-economy, one always finds an exceptional state, strong, aggressive and privileged, dynamic, simultaneously feared and admired.’ - Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries This, surely, is an apt description of the British Empire at its zenith. Of Planting and Planning explores how Britain used the formation of towns and cities as an instrument of colonial expansion and control throughout the Empire. Beginning with the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster and ending with decolonization after the Second World War, Robert Home reveals how the British Empire gave rise to many of the biggest cities in the world and how colonial policy and planning had a profound impact on the form and functioning of those cities. This second edition retains the thematic, chronological and interdisciplinary approach of the first, each chapter identifying a key element of colonial town planning. New material and illustrations have been added, incorporating the author's further research since the first edition. Most importantly, Of Planting and Planning remains the only book to cover the whole sweep of British colonial urbanism.

When people look at success stories among postcolonial nations, the focus almost always turns to Asia, where many cities in former colonies have become key locations of international commerce and culture. This book brings together a stellar group of scholars from a number of disciplines to explore the rise of Asian cities, including Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and more. Dealing with history, geography, culture, architecture, urbanism, and other topics, the book attempts to formulate a new understanding of what makes Asian cities such global leaders.

Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World is a collection of essays on the cities of the Portuguese empire written by the leading scholars in the field. The volume, like the empire it analyzes, has a global scope and a chronological span of three centuries. The contributions focus on the social, political, and economic aspects of city life in settlements as far apart as Rio de Janeiro, Mozambique Island, and Nagasaki. Despite the seeming (and real) disparities between the colonial cities located in South America, Africa, and Asia, this volume demonstrates that they possessed a range of commonalities. Beyond their shared language, these cities had similar social, religious, and political institutions that shaped their identities. In many cases, the civic bodies analyzed in these essays such as the city councils or the Misericórdias (charitable brotherhoods), no less than the convents and houses of Catholic religious orders, contributed more to making these cities Portuguese than their allegiance to the crown in Lisbon. Rather than dividing the globe into Atlantic and Indian Ocean spheres, Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World takes the novel approach of bringing together analyses of the social history of these cities in order to stress their shared aspects as well as to suggest paths for fruitful comparisons. By encouraging further scholarship in this rich, yet understudied subject, this collection will not only further comparisons between cities found within the Portuguese empire, but also raise important issues that will be of interest to historians of other European empires, as well as urban historians generally.

Revealing the enduring link between settler colonization and the making of modern Minneapolis Colonial relations are often excluded from discussions of urban politics and are viewed instead as part of a regrettable past. In Settler Colonial City, David Hugill confronts this culture of organized forgetting by arguing that Minnesota’s largest city is enduringly bound up with the power dynamics of settler-colonial politics. Examining several distinct Minneapolis sites, Settler Colonial City tracks how settler-colonial relations were articulated alongside substantial growth in the Twin Cities Indigenous community during the second half of the twentieth century—creating new geographies of racialized advantage. Studying the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis in the decades that followed the Second World War, Settler Colonial City demonstrates how colonial practices and mentalities shaped processes of urban reorganization, animated non-Indigenous “advocacy research,” informed a culture of racialized policing, and intertwined with a broader culture of American imperialism. It reveals how the actions, assumptions, and practices of non-Indigenous people in Minneapolis produced and enforced a racialized economy of power that directly contradicts the city’s “progressive” reputation. Ultimately, Settler Colonial City argues that the hierarchical and racist political dynamics that characterized the city’s prosperous beginnings are not exclusive to a bygone era but rather are central to a recalibrated settler-colonial politics that continues to shape contemporary cities across the United States.

"Originally published in the U.K. in 2014 under the title Ten cities that made an empire, by Allen Lane, London."

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities is a comparative study of architectural space in four (post-)colonial capitals: Belfast, Northern Ireland; Windhoek, Namibia; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Each chapter takes up one of these cities, outlining its history of building and urban planning under colonial rule and linking that history to its contemporary shape and scope. This genealogical information is drawn from primary source documents and archival materials. The chapters then look to local literary texts to better understand the lingering impact of colonial building practices on individuals living in (post-)colonial cities today. These texts often foreground the difficulty of moving through a city that can never feel comfortably one's own; legacies of racial segregation, buildings that disregard indigenous resources, and street names that serve as constant reminders of a history of oppression, for example, can produce feelings of anxiety, even of unbelonging, for native subjects. However, the literature also highlights ways in which the subversive wanderings of particular pedestrians—taking shortcuts, trespassing in forbidden places, diverting spaces from their intended uses—can contest 'official' topography. Bodies can therefore move against the power of a repressive regime, at least to some degree, even when that power is literally set in stone. Obert argues for the significance of these small gestures of reclamation, suggesting that we must counterpose the potential flexibility of lived space to the prohibitions of the map in order to more fully understand (post-)colonial power relations.