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A Tale Of Three Global Ghettos : How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History
Carl H. Nightingale Journal of Urban History 2003 29: 257 DOI: 10.1177/0096144202250383
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10.1177/0096144202250383 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003 Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS
A TALE OF THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS

How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History
CARL H. NIGHTINGALE
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The word ghetto has been used with increasing currency worldwide. American urban historians have yet to address the questions that arise from the question of whether ghetto is an appropriate term for urban segregation outside the United States. Arnold Hirschs division of the history of American ghettos into three periods offers a useful scheme to begin deepening conceptions of the global dynamics of racial segregation. It gives historical depth to efforts under way in the social sciences to understand such dynamics by portraying ghettos as dynamic phenomena that change in tune with the complex contingencies of local, national, and global political conflicts. In particular, the story of the three ghettos coincides well with critical changes in the direction of twentieth-century global political conflicts over the shape of the world economy and the meanings of race.
Keywords: ghetto; racial segregation; urban theory; global politics; white supremacy
The word ghetto, just like everything else these days, has gone global. Or, to be more historically accurate, it always has been quite a worldly word, but now it has become a truly flamboyant border-and-ocean crosser. Etymologists straining to locate its earliest origins scoured sources in Venice, Germany, and the Middle East, and they even listed the Latin word for Egypt as one of their suspects.1 Historians tracing the early-modern practice of ghetto making traversed the European Jewish diaspora from Portugal to the Pale, and their colleagues in the twentieth century have wrestled with the horrors of Lodz, Warsaw, Riga, and the ghettos role as the staging ground for mass killing. By the 1920s, the word had taken its biggest geographical leap yet, across the Atlantic Ocean, where Chicago school sociologists multiplied its meanings promiscuously, using it to refer to any community they deemed self-contained, whether primarily the home of Jews, Poles, Italians, Mexicans, Chinese, or African Americans.2 Then, sometime during the twenty years after that, ghetto became more specific againat least in one respecttaking on its most common contemporary verbal companion, black. In the past thirty-odd years, ghetto, still associated heavily with African Americans, has become a real jet-setter, but as it crisscrosses the global village
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 29 No. 3, March 2003 257-271 DOI: 10.1177/0096144202250383 2003 Sage Publications
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with ever greater abandon, its meanings have proliferated profusely. Ghetto has used many conveyances in its planetary travels, but three are most important: politics, popular culture, and social science. Politics, because for the worlds New Right movements, from Scandinavia to South Africa to the Antipodes, ghetto has become the mother of all racial code words, easily paired in any language with riot, crime, underclass, welfare dependency, and other means to rally white swing voters rightward by sounding alarms about the mortal dangers posed by the unrestrained power of societys outcasts and their advocates. The idea that Europes cities are Americanizing as much as its movie theaters and its fast cuisine has raised still other possibilities for mongering moral panic. For their part, left-of-center parties have often responded in a similarly demagogic manner to woo their working-class constituents back. However, in Europe and elsewhere, their alarms also sometimes focus on ghettos as evidence of a need for ever-more encompassing welfare states. The engines of mass culture, meanwhile, have beamed a typically kaleidoscopic version of ghettos throughout the airwaves of the global village. Apocalyptic projections dominate to be sure, helped along by international news reports of tourist murders in Miami or Devils Night fires in Detroit or, perhaps most resonantly, Jimmy Carters 1978 pilgrimage to the South Bronx. But in the hands of global hip hopwhich includes groups ranging from Houstons Geto Boys to Torontos Ghetto Concept and has produced albums ranging from Ghetto Moudjahidin, of the group Ness & Cit from Le Havre, France, to Ghetto Code of Johannesburgs Prophets of Da Cityghetto has also become a term of pride and envy, a word to represent with braggadocio, a means for ghetto residents the world over to capitalize on their neighborhoods urban edginess through the symbolic alchemy of what Robin D. G. Kelley calls ghettocentricty. A kind of international solidarity could also be found, for example, in the rhymes of O Rappa, a hip hop group inspired by Black Power from the Baixada Fluminense favelas near Rio de Janeiro. Tudo, tudo, tudo, igual, they proclaim (All, all, all the same), Brixton, Bronx, ou Baixada.3 Social scientists have scurried to contain the fallout caused by ghettos world travels and the explosion of connotations that now ricochet off the surface of what was once a neutral-enough concept. This is a lot like the Bronx, isnt it? a kid from the shantytown Villa Paraso near Buenos Aires asked sociologist Javier Auyero.4 During the 1990s, a whole academic industry sprouted up asking basically the same thing, complete with a flurry of international scholarly conferences, not to mention a small fortune in European Union funding. Was it possible that Londons Brixton, Pariss La Courneuve, Munichs Hasenbergl, Stockholms Rinkeby, Sydneys Redfern, Johannesburgs Hillbrow, Nairobis River Road, So Paulos Zona Leste, Mexico Citys Nezahualcyotl, and Torontos Jane/Finch were all ghettos?5
Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS
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In answering such questions, sociologists, geographers, and urban theorists have employed increasingly sophisticated methodologies and theoretical apparatuses. At first, comparative analysis was an excuse to definewith what seemed ever-diminishing complexityexactly what a ghetto was and what it was not. Crime rates, underclass indicators, segregation indices, and William Julius Wilsons concentration effects were measured, and Chicagos were held up next to paler but intensifying imitations from Hamburg or Birmingham. Pointed fights broke out about the relationship between ghetto and slum, as well as over the precise physiognomy of some newly discovered creatureshyperghettos, outcast ghettos, enclaves, and citadels. More recently, though, the quest has been for some bigger global process that itself might be tied to segregating inegalitarian tendencies in cities. One candidate for that process is a version of the one outlined in Saskia Sassens The Global City, involving supposed increases in urban inequality brought on by the concentration of corporate command-and-control centers in a few cities and the vast new waves of low-wage immigrant labor such cities attract. Wondering whether globalization had created a New Spatial Order in cities, Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen gathered geographers and planners from around the worldincluding researchers interested in ghettos in such seemingly unlikely locations as Calcutta, Singapore, and Tokyoand decided ultimately that, while cities contained plenty of new segregation, inequality, and exclusion, they were tied in simply too many diverse ways to the world economy to merit any unified classification. Sako Musterd and Wim Ostendorf likewise pulled together an international cast of social scientistsall from the Atlantic world in their caseto come up with only slightly less lukewarm conclusions about the impact of changing (usually receding) welfare states on segregation in cities.6 Whats a historian to say? We ourselves have been largely, perhaps voluntarily, segregated from these debates, and historians of American cities where, everyone agrees, real ghettos were bornhave been most conspicuously absent. This is not merely because (as some who promote projects to internationalize American history have suggested) American historians in general see the rest of the world as a blur and prefer less exotic locations such as Pittsburgh for our conventionsnor is it solely because we are not up to speed yet on our French or our Bengali. It also has to do with the academic fundamentals of method and analysis. American urban history continues to focus resolutely on the local. The fields bread and butter continues to be the case study, despite some internal hand-wringing about that fact and despite a few fine national syntheses that have sought to redress it. There is no doubt that exploring the kinds of questions that arise from the globalization of ghetto-talk would require U.S. urban historians to stretch their methods. In my own look into these matters over the past few years, I felt it necessary to school myself in the work of world historiansin particular, their challenges to traditional comparative analysis and their growing interest in the
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global connections between different parts of the world, including cities. I have been particularly attracted to the idea that such international connections or flowstypically thought of in terms of money, things, ideas, and peoplemust be analyzed in the context of networks of global power and conflicts over global power, including those of states, international institutions, and efforts of political mobilization on the elite or grassroots levels that have a global scope. I have also supplemented this analytical retooling with some attention to the work of self-described heterodox international economists who, largely outside the purview of historians, have conducted lively and illuminating debates about the nature of globalization, often focusing on its political driving forcesmost important, on the global scope of redistributional conflicts between corporate employers, workers, and nation-states.7 A little nearer to history, racial theory, too, has proven a rich ground for exploration. It has recently revived a long tradition of examining both the political and the planetary dimensions of the color line, particularly the global struggles between white supremacy and racial egalitarianism and the worldwide reach of institutionalized white privilege.8 Many of these insights are nearly or completely absent from the work of social scientists and urban theorists who have been at the forefront of contemplating the global nature of urban segregation and ghettos. None of these travels into other fields would come to any good end, though, without relying on the best accomplishments of urban history, particularly urban historians deeply complex idea of the American ghetto itself. The fields attention to the contingency and variability of change, to the role of political conflict as well as impersonal processes in explaining those changes, provides an indispensable antidote to the totalizing, impersonal, and sometimes even mechanistic explanations offered by urban theorists. Even the local orientation produces critical insights since global political struggles over class and race issues all take place on innumerable and various local battlefields, and the battlefields of urban politics are some of the most important. Indeed, the sense that ghettos cannot be seen as solely phenomena of class or race but a manifestation of their inextricable interchange was an idea hashed out earlier and in much greater depth in urban history than in social scientific writing on ghettos (gender issues remain too much on the sidelines in both fields, however). Finally, and for my purposes here most importantly, historians focus on the past helps us refute social scientists tendency to date all dramatic historic transformations to the past thirty years. In a more integrated and multidisciplinary effort to understand the global contexts of ghettos, the work of American urban historians to this point would be most helpful in pressing questions of chronology, periodization, and the longer dure. In this respect, the work of Arnold Hirsch is especially indispensable. The chronological arguments he put forth in Making the Second Ghettoas well as those he elaborated on in the context of the entire century and the whole urban United States in his 1993 article With or Without Jim
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Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United Statesexplode the idea of the singular ghetto. Rather, Hirsch tells us, ghettos were built, unbuilt, and rebuilt on three different broad patterns in three different periods of the twentieth century. Different demographic dynamics and, above all, different engines of segregation operated in each. His choice of periods in particular reflects the timing of the U.S. federal governments assumption of a central role in segregating cities. He dates the first ghetto from 1880 to 1933, when segregation intensified mostly without assistance from the government. From 1933 to 1968, the period of the second ghetto, a brace of federal agencies exhorted segregation by literally paving the way for white flight, leveling most first ghettos through urban renewal, and pushing African Americans beyond the peripheries of downtown, many of them into grim public housing projects. Two decades of open housing activism and five years of fiery rebellions in the streets culminated in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, making housing discrimination illegal and opening a third chapter of ghetto history, which, as best as anyone can tell, is still with us.9 There are always reasons to criticize periodization schemes. Most historians of first ghettos would argue that 1880 is too early a starting point. The two World Wars fell smack in the middle of Hirschs periods, arguably minimizing their role in the story. His notion of a third ghetto is especially undeveloped, focusing mostly on the suburbanization of middle-class African Americans. His story accounts little for the economic history of ghettos, even though ghettos relative economic marginality is as critical an attribute as their segregation (as well as being intertwined with it). The process of deindustrialization, for example, which is thought by many to be a critical aspect of the ghetto economy, at least straddles the second and third periods. Other continuities may, of course, be obscured, as well as diversity among ghettos at any given time and changes within periods. Some may object that assigning numbers to ghettos gives a falsely objective ring to our categories. In the end, though, I stand by Arnold Hirschs tale of three ghettos. His short exposition of the tale in a short article obviously leaves a lot out, but the basic ideas remain flexible and richly developable. Thinking of ghettos as the product of a series of transformations that span the century not only challenges social scientists mind-numbing search for ideal-types. The numbering system also frees us from narratives of ghetto history based on monodirectional directional change such as the origins of the urban crisis, the rise of the underclass, or the process of hyperghettoization, all of which end with ghettos worse off as time goes on, thus implying a problematic Golden Age in an earlier period. It also allows us to think about many layers of experience at once and thus to imagine that moments of ambiguous promise can coexist amid less hopeful developments. By establishing the civil rights movements victories in the late sixties as a turning point, it also signals that ghettos are the products of change from below, not just from aboveor, more accurately, that ghetto residents are capable of making some, if not all, of their own history.
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Political conflictwith all its indeterminacy, ambiguity, contingency, and unpredictabilityis a driving force in the periodization scheme. And, it turns out, the three ghettos not only shed helpful light on racial politics, but they also coincide reasonably well with big turning points in class politics. All of these attributes, it turns out, make the three ghettos an ideal chronological backbone for the internationalization of ghetto history. What follows is a highly condensed version of the tale of three global ghettos that I developed as part of a larger project on this theme. It depends heavily on Arnold Hirschs original periodization scheme. A schematic outline of this tale is included in Table 1.10 Since their origins, U.S. ghettos have been fundamentally immersed in and have in many ways participated in the outcomes of a century of world-spanning political conflicts. Of these conflicts, two are most important. The first involves conflicts between mobilized political forces of global capital and finance that promote inequalities in the world economy against more egalitarian movements, such as the labor movement and middle-class reformers. The second involves conflicts within the politics of race: those who seek to extend racial privileges for whites oppose resistance movements inspired by visions of racial equality against colonialism, segregation, and other institutionalized injustices linked to color or culture. The first ghettos came into being most often near the downtowns of American cities during the first third of the twentieth century. During this period, western corporate and financial power, riding the wide influence of nineteenth-century classic liberalism and free trade rhetoric, battled labor and middle-class social reform movements across the world with greater or lesser success in different national contexts. In the United States, during World War I, with the decline of immigration from Europe, some older patterns changed temporarily: industry opened up for the first time to African Americans, stimulating a great migration from the rural and urban South. After the war, though, old patterns of employment discrimination hardened, and capital successfully fought back against the labor movement and co-opted many progressive reforms. Most American ghettos thus first came into being just as economic inequalities reached new heights during the 1920s. White supremacy sustained its global influence during this period too, as formal empires and systems of segregation solidified across the world. Imperial and national authorities on almost all continents began the task of segregating cities by equating urban problems such as vice, crime, disease, and social unrest with blacks and other people of color and suggesting urban division as a means to solve those problems. In the United States, this global racial urbanism informed the actions of the white homeowners, realtors, and banks that transformed an urban landscape marked by scattered minority-black enclaves into one of the large-scale segregated majority-black communities we know as ghettos.11 These first ghettos were also marked by the founding of separate black-run institutions that served their residents. It also coincided with the
TABLE 1
Periodizing U.S. Ghettos in Global Context

First Ghetto (Approximately 1900-1933) Second Ghetto (Approximately 1933-1968) Third Ghetto (Approximately 1968-?)
Momentum in global politics: World economy Classic liberalism Racial politics Classic white supremacy Neoliberalism Neoracism
Ghetto resistance
National trends in wealth and income inequality, job markets
Highlights of institutionalized white privilege Discrimination in private real estate markets: racial steering, blockbusting, restrictive covenants, mob violence; state role limited to courts, police
Independent black institutions; modern civil rights movement begins Relegation of blacks to service jobs, alleviated during World War I; low wages, high poverty, and very high inequality Employment discrimination, somewhat alleviated in World War I; increasing housing discrimination
Welfare state Keynesianism Racism built into welfare state but increasingly challenged Electoral strength of ghettos; civil rights victories in 1964-1968 Deindustrialization begins, but because of labor movement strength, growth yields wage increases and decreases in poverty, inequality Addition of racially segregated welfare state 1960s: civil rights acts versus racial discrimination
Dynamics of urban residential segregation
Black mayors; ebb in urban power vis--vis suburbs; new resistance Industrial flight in many cities; attack on labor movement; wages decrease, poverty persists, and inequality increases despite growth Attacks on efforts to alleviate racial inequalities; race-coded attacks on welfare, crime; discrimination expands in criminal justice Welfare state less active in sustaining segregation; domestic security state takes a big role; private discrimination persists
Trends in spatial segregation
Increasing segregation; creation of large, contiguous majority-black racial ghettos
During 1930s-1960s, huge intervention of state on behalf of segregation: Home Owners Owners Loan Corporation, Federal Housing Administration policies, federal sanction to redlining, racially discriminatory public housing, urban renewal, and transport policies Highest segregation indices reached in 1950s and 1960s
Barely decreasing indices; gentrification pressures; suburbanization of segregation; increasing segregation by class within ghettos; complication of urban color lines; militarization of urban space
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(continued)
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First Ghetto (Approximately 1900-1933)

Near downtown; often in vice districts; densely populated; class segregation within ghettos First Great Migration, especially 1915-1920
Second Ghetto (Approximately 1933-1968)
Third Ghetto (Approximately 1968-?)
Geographic location
Demographic contexts
Expansion into large areas of city; destruction of historic ghettos and removal to periphery of downtown; institutional cordons sanitaires between downtown and ghetto Second Great Migration, especially 1941-1968
Expansion of ghettos within many cities, though less dense; segregated black districts grow in suburbs; prisons as annexes to ghettos New immigration, especially from Latin America, Asia
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beginnings of resistance to housing and employment discrimination, including a successful campaign against legalized residential segregation. The second ghetto of the middle third of the twentieth century was marked by a series of changes in the direction of worldwide conflicts over economic and racial equality. The moderately declining economic inequalities of that period reflect the waning of classic liberalism during and after the global great depression, as well as the rise in power of labor movements and other reformist liberal initiatives such as western welfare states and the Keynesian Bretton Woods regime for the world economy. Black poverty declined dramatically during the 1960s under the auspices of this reformist regime, even if black unemployment continued to be higher than that of whites, reflecting both persistent racial discrimination and the beginnings of capital flight from cities that would later be called deindustrialization. During the 1930s and 1940s, however, white supremacy continued its reign despite insurgent anticolonial and civil rights movements, and it was successful in putting its stamp on U.S. federal housing policies and other aspects of the welfare state, thus creating new institutions of white privilege. Against the backdrop of a renewed migration from the South, the New Deals Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) instituted highly discriminatory housing policies. These were aggravated by similarly racially biased urban renewal, public housing, and transportation policies, which not only solidified the boundaries of ghettos but also pushed them outward from downtown. Inspired by anti-colonial forces across the world (and also giving those movements inspiration), the American black liberation movement managed to whittle away some at this edifice by 1968. Combined with some progress against poverty and economic inequality, the late sixties marked a period of substantial, if fragile, promise for ghetto residents as well as people of color across the world. The third period of ghetto formation encompasses the years since the civil rights movement, when corporate and financial power remobilized itself under the banner of free markets and the organized defense of white privilege also resurged. Both of these political offensives have once again turned the tide in global politics, rolling back the hard-won if vulnerable victories for economic and racial equality of the mid-century. The first of the contemporary inegalitarian political offensives, the neoliberal offensive, has promoted vast new expansions of multinational corporate power over the world economy by resuscitating the classic liberal rhetoric of free markets. This global political movement has achieved substantial successes by operating simultaneously on four different fronts. First, its intellectual leaders have vigorously promoted neoliberal ideas in universities, governments, corporations, media networks, and other crucial institutions across the world. Second, deregulated financial markets, unaccountable central banks, and one-dollar-one-vote international credit organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have achieved enormous
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powers over national governments, forcing them above all to cut back on spending, taxation, and regulation. Third, those national governments (particularly the nation-states of the English-speaking world, with the U.S. federal government in the lead) have taken their own steps to diminish their welfare policies and their regulation of corporations. Instead, they have actively prioritized and promoted corporate interests, and they have empowered agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to enhance the possibility of new victories of this sort. And, fourth, giant multinational companies themselves have vastly expanded their own political clout within governments, international institutions, communities, ethnic networks, and workplaces, in the process waging war on labor unions and local government regulations and doing whatever they can do to suppress their obligations to society, including, above all, wages, regulations, and taxes. As part of these broader aims, they have employed new communications technologies, plant closings, postfordist productions systems, and the capacity to move capital, facilities, and assembly lines across the globe as critical assets, but we must remember that such behaviorsoften summed up by terms such as globalization and deindustrializationare not an complete inventory of their weapons of power. The second of todays victorious inegalitarian global political offensives operates within the politics of race, and I call it the neoracist offensive. Its mission is to preserve and expand institutions and practices that guarantee a whole range of privileges for whites and to do so without seeming to be racist. The institutions and practices of white privilege, which evolved over the past five hundred years of European expansion, have survived in new forms, despite the dismantling of formal Western imperialist and segregationist regimes. The racial segregation of American ghettos is one of the most obvious results of their work, but they operate across societyin job, housing, and investment markets; in the provision of social, educational, health, and transportation services; in the law and the forces of social control; in access to representative institutions; and in the management of the environment. In all of the worlds societies dominated by people of European descent, leaders of the movement to preserve such avenues of white privilege have built powerful, nearly allwhite New Right electoral coalitions. The various components of this transnational neoracist movement are more loosely connected than those of the neoliberal corporate movement, and they reflect the many different racial ideologies that operate in different national cultures. But they share numerous characteristics. All of them usually avoid outright expressions of white supremacy in their campaigns, all adamantly deny the existence of institutionalized racial inequality, and all insist on portraying whites as victims of racial injustice. At the same time, all rely on deceptive code wordsincluding the word ghettoto keep the stereotypes and racial hierarchies of classic white supremacy alive. And all appeal to high ideals of national preservation or even equality itself to camouflage their own defense of institutional racial
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inequality. In this task, the United States New Rights racial politics has been very influential across the world. It has had much political success by cloaking its wars against affirmative action, anti-discrimination agencies, civil rights law in general, welfare recipients, immigrants, the homeless, drug sellers and users, and criminalsas well as the draconian and racially discriminatory measures of control and punishment that accompany those campaignsas virtuous, color-blind, racial egalitarianism. Residents of the third ghetto, especially the poor, have suffered much from the combined efforts of neoliberals and neoracists. As regulation of the world economy has weakened, following free-market doctrine, the three most important economic pipelines that distribute income and wealth to the poor within advanced societies have eroded: the pipeline of wage work, the pipeline of government benefits, and even the pipeline of credit and homeownership. As a result, most of the relatively positive economic trends that materialized during the middle third of the twentieth century have reversed themselves. The wealthy global North grew at the expense of the poorer global South, and inequality soared within most of the worlds national economies as wages stagnated or fell. Economic booms during the past thirty years have done less than their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s to decrease joblessness and poverty such as that concentrated in ghettos, and then only late during periods of expansionor, as in the late 1990s in the United States, during a tenuous speculative bubble. Meanwhile, neoracist rhetoric has removed any mention of institutionalized racial inequality from mainstream public debate, and the gap between white and black income and wealth has persisted. Residential segregation by color has also persisted in the United States and expanded to the suburbs. Segregation by class within black communities has increased. In the United States, enforcement of anti-discrimination laws weakened, city governments (many run by people of color) lost power on the national stage to the suburbs, police abuse continued, racial and class divisions in urban space were more heavily militarized, and a giant effort to expand the American prison system, lavishly employing neoracist rhetoric, resulted in the incarceration of nearly a whole generation of young ghetto residents. None of this meant that American ghetto residents or their compatriots elsewhere in the world have disappeared from the scene of world history. Not only have they played a central role in creating global culture, especially the youthful culture of hip hop, but they have also begun to have a new impact on the shape of global political conflicts. Undoubtedly, the anti-colonial, civil rights, and labor movements have seen their power decline overall since the late 1960s as their internal ties, their international connections, and the egalitarian commitment of too many of their leaders eroded. But under the leadership of thousands of creative neighborhood organizers and cultural activistsand allied to some degree with a new generation of labor, student, environmental, and womens activiststhey have sustained what they could of their social movements, changing their tactics over time to meet new challenges. At the
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very edge of the new millennium, they have begun to show new life and arguably even the beginnings of a new international outlook. Whether their effortscombined with the growing popular dissatisfaction with corporate practices, as well as some signs of a softening of racial rhetoric brought on by the New Rights need to court the Latino immigrant votesignal the beginnings of a more promising fourth ghetto remains an unclear but inviting prospect. There is no doubt much in that story to debate, modify, amplify, and ultimately rearrange. But a tale something like it is necessary if we are to even begin confronting the questions posed by the globalization of the ghetto concept. It opens up a different way to ask and answer whether ghettos have appeared across the world. What are the connections as well as the similarities and differences between urban places across the world that face combinations of geographic segregation by color, class, or gender; relative impoverishment; political marginality; and cultural stigmatization? To what extent have the complex outcomes of the same global political conflicts affected those different places in similar ways? Can we speak of periods of relative convergence and divergence, and can those political conflicts help us explain such changes? By pushing social scientists and urban theorists to consider the historical contexts and the historical multiplicity of ghettos, we also fruitfully challenge our own paradigms as American urban historians. Cities across the world have always been split up in unequal ways, and segregation based on some notion of color or race has been present in many places across the world since European imperial conquests and urban settlement began. Just because the U.S. ghetto has become the standard by which to judge such things today should not blind us from the possibility that ghettos themselves evolved from earlier practices elsewhere in the world.
1. Robert K. Barnhardt, ed., The Barnhardt Dictionary of Etymology (N.p.: H.W. Wilson Co., 1988), 430. 2. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1928), 282-3, and see Robert Parks Forward, vii-viii. Robert E. Park, Edward W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 55-6, 150-1. 3. On ghettocentricity, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994). Ness & Cit, Ghetto Moudjahidin on album Ghetto Moudjahidin, DIN Records (Le Havre, France, n.d.); Ghetto Concept, All Stars Da Album, BMG Music (Toronto, 2002); Prophets of Da City, Ghetto Code, Ghetto Ruff Records (Johannesburg, n.d.); O Rappa, Brixton, Bronx ou Baixada, on album O Rappa, produced by Fabio Henriques, Warner Music (Brasil, 1994). 4. Javier Auyero, This Is a Lot Like the Bronx, Isnt It? Lived Experiences of Marginality in an Argentine Slum, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 (1999): 45-69. 5. Brahim Chanchabi, with Catherine de Withol de Wenden, Cits et Diversits: LImmigration en Europe (Paris Aidda, 1995); Peter Hall, The Inner City Worldwide, in Peter Hall, ed., The Inner City in Context: The Final Report of the Social Sciences Research Council Inner Cities Working Party (London: Heinemann, 1981); John Rex, The Ghetto and Underclass: Essays on Race and Social Policy (Aldershot,
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UK: Avebury, 1988); Susan J. Smith, Residential Segregation and the Politics of Racialization, in Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith, eds., Racism, the City and the State (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1993), 128-43; Loic J. D. Wacquant, The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implications, Acta Sociologica 39 (1996): 122-39; Wacquant, Banlieues Franaises et le Ghetto Noir Amricain: de lAmalgame la Comparaison, French Politics and Society 10, no. 4 (1992): 81-103; Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, no. 3 (1993): 366-83; Wacquant, The Comparative Structure and Experience of Urban Exclusion: Race, Class, and Space in Chicago and Paris, in Katherine McFate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson, eds., Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy: Western States and the New World Order (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), 543-70; Adil Jazouli, Les Annes Banlieues (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 17-63; Herv Vieillard-Baron, Les Banlieues Franaises: ou le Ghetto Impossible (N.p.: Editions de lAube, 1994); Franois Dubet and Didier Lapeyronnie, Les Quartiers dExil (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992); Sophie Body-Gendrot, Migration and the Racialization of the Postmodern City in France, in Cross and Keith, eds., Racism, the City and the State, 77-92; Enzo Mingione, Urban Poverty in the Advanced Industrial World: Concepts, Analysis and Debates, in Mingione, ed., Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader, 3-40; Nick Buck, Social and Economic Change in Contemporary Britain: The Emergence of an Urban Underclass? in Mingione, ed., Urban Poverty, 277-98; Hartmut Husserman, Andreas Kappha, and Rainer Muenz, Berlin: Immigration, Social Problems, Political Approaches (unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the New Urban Underclass, Berlin, June 1996); Hartmut Hussermann, Social Transformation of Urban Space in Berlin since 1960 (unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the New Urban Underclass, Berlin, June 1996); Jens S. Dangschat and David Fasenfest, (Re)Structuring Urban Poverty: The Impact of Globalization on Its Extent and Concentration (unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the New Urban Underclass, Berlin, June 1996); Christian Kesteloot, La Problmatique de lIntgration des Jeunes Urbains: Une Analyse Gographique du Cas Bruxellois (unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the New Urban Underclass, Berlin, June 1996); Sophie Watson, Work and Leisure in Tomorrows Cities, in Stuart Rees, Gordon Rodley, and Frank Stilwell, eds., Beyond the Market: Alternatives to Economic Rationalism (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1993), 11-2; see also Mark Peel, The Urban Debate: From Los Angeles to the Urban Village, in Patrick Troy, ed., Australian Cities: Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia (Hong Kong: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39-40. 6. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen, eds., Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000); Sako Musterd and Wim Ostendorf, eds., Urban Segregation and the Welfare State: Inequality and Exclusion in Western Cities (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1998). 7. See, for example, James Crotty, Gerald Epstein, and Patricia Kelley, Multinational Corporations in the Neo-Liberal Regime, in Baker, Epstein, and Pollin, eds., Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy, 117-43; David M. Kotz, The U.S. Economy in the 1990s: A Neo-Liberal Success Story? (unpublished paper in authors possession); Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, with United for a Fair Economy, Economic Apartheid in America (New York: New Press, 2000); Kavaljit Singh, The Globalization of Finance: A Citizens Guide (London: Zed Books, 1999); Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, 2d ed. (Cape Town: IPSR Books, 1998); Robin Hahnel, Panic Rules: Everything You Need to Know about the Global Economy (Cambridge, UK: South End Press, 1999); William K. Tabb: Unequal Partners: A Primer on Globalization (New York: New Press, 2002); Tabb, The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Edward Luttwak, Turbocapitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Susan Strange, Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Governments (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity (London: Verso, 1998); Harry Shutt, The Trouble with Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure (London: Zed Books, 1999). Robin Hahnel, Capitalist Globalism in Crisis: Boom and Bust, series of five articles in Z Magazine: December 1998, 46-52; January 1999, 51-7; February 1999, 47-54; March 1999, 52-7; and April 1999, 329. Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, MAI and the Threat to American Freedom (New York: Stoddart, 1997); Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, 2d ed. (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1997); HansPeter Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global Trap: Globalization and the Assault on Democracy and Prosperity (London: Zed Books, 1997); William Greider, One World: Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (London: Verso, 1997); J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist
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Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache, eds., States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1996); Titus Alexander, Unraveling Global Apartheid: An Overview of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002); Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas Weissfopf, After the Wasteland: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C. Trachte, Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1990); Howard M. Wachtel, The Money Mandarins: The Making of a Supranational Economic Order (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Arthur MacEwan and William K. Tabb, eds., Instability and Change in the World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989); David M. Gordon, The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations? New Left Review 68 (March-April 1988): 24-65. 8. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1986; 2d ed. 1994); Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Winant, The New International Dynamics of Race, Poverty and Race 4 (1995): 1-5. David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, 2d ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Ansley, New Right New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 49-73; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) (see also Afterword in the 2d ed., 2000); Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1995); Ignatiev and John Garvey, Race Traitor (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1996); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940) (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1999). David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African American Womens History and the Metalanguage of Race, Signs 17 (1992): 251-74; the essays in Wahneema Lubiano, The House that Race Built and Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995); Philip F. Rubio, A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001); John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael Wieviorka, Lespace du racisme (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1991), translated into English as The Arena of Racism (London: Sage, 1995); Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul in association with Pluto Press [Annandale, New South Wales], 2000); the essays collected and edited by Danile Joly in Scapegoats and Social Actors: The Exclusion of Minorities in Western and Eastern Europe (Houndmills, UK: MacMillan, 1998); Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Joe Feagin, Hernn Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 2001); George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981); Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1971); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 9. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; Hirsch, With or without Jim Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United States, in Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 65-99. 10. I have developed this narrative as part of a larger book project tentatively titled The Ghetto in the Global Village: U.S. Urban Poverty and Racial Segregation in World-Historical Perspective. This represents an update of my original foray into this field, titled The Global Inner City: Toward a Historical Analysis, in W. E. B. DuBois, Race and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, ed. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). I have also developed these ideas and my response to urban theorists and social scientists in an unpublished paper called Are There Any Ghettos in the Global City? (and Other Questions about Urban Theory and World Historical Change).
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11. I have explored some of these topics in a paper in progress, The World Travels of Racial Urbanism: Urban Racial Segregation as a Global Historical Phenomenon.
Carl Nightingale is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is currently a visiting professor of history at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee. He is the author of On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (1993) and is currently working on a project titled The Ghetto in the Global Village: A World History of the Urban Color Line.
THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN URBAN SEGREGATION

By Carl H. Nightingale State University of New York at Buffalo
"Segregation is apparent everywhere," warned Dr. Ernest Lyon to a standingroom only congregation at Baltimore's largely black John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church on December 4, 1910. Cities divided by race could be found "not only in the United States, but even in Africa, the natural habitat of the black man." Lyon could speak from experience. He had just returned from Liberia, where he had been the U.S. Resident Minister and Consul Ceneral since 1903. In his sermon he reported that in the neighboring British colony of Sierra Leone "the whites have vacated the valleys, leaving them to the blacks, while they have escaped to the mountains. This method obtains throughout that vast continent, wherever the Anglo-Saxon and Teuton are found."' Lyon was speaking of "Hill Station," an all-European residential zone that British authorities developed on a small mountaintop a few miles outside Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, on a plan borrowed from longstanding practices in India.^ He also may have heen alluding to reports of intensifying segregation in South Africa. But his grim picture of an emerging global segregationism clearly contained troubling local significance. "The city fathers of Baltimore," Lyon reminded his audience, "are having under advisement at this time a measure which seeks to deprive free men ... of their right to live and own property anywhere they can." Two weeks later, on December 20, Baltimore Mayor John Barry Mahool signed into law the so-called West Segregation Ordinance, named after its sponsor in City Council Samuel L. West. The measure divided every street in Baltimore into "white blocks" and "colored blocks," based on the "race" of the majority of their inhabitants at the time of the Ordinance's passage. It set a penalty of one hundred dollars and up to a year in the Baltimore City Jail for anyone who moved on to a block set aside for the "opposite race," except black servants who lived in the houses of their white employers.^ The law ran into repeated problems in the courts, forcing the city council. Mayor Mahool, and his successor James H. Preston to pass a total of four versions over the ensuing yearsthe second in April, 1911; the third a month later; and the fourth in September, 1913. But the mayor's office received enthusiastic letters fi"om all points of the compass requesting copies of the most recent version of the Ordinanceincluding the mayors of numerous southern cities. New York City's Title and Mortgage Company, Chicago's City Hall, the powerful Chicago Real Estate Board, and even the imperial authorities at Cebu in the U.S.-occupied Philippines.'' Authorities in dozens of U.S. cities from Atlanta to St. Louis to New Orleans passed copycat legislation. In 1913, Baltimore's segregation ordinance helped inspire an unsuccessful campaign to establish South-African style rural segregation in the Southern countryside. Lawyers for the Baltimore chapter of the still-fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought the law locally, forcing its most extensive
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revision in 1913. Then the national office of the NAACP brought a test suit against a similar law in Louisville, Kentucky. Its efforts bore fruit in the Supreme Court's Buchanan vs Warley decision which declared residential segregation by municipal ordinance unconstitutional. Even so, the west Ordinance remained inspirational to racists: urban authorities in still other Southern cities and in Ku-Klux-Klan-dominated Indianapolis passed new versions well into the 1920s and even as late as 1940.^ This paper takes up the theme in Reverend Lyon's sermon that Baltimore's segregation schemes were in some way connected to those in Africa and elsewhere. It is based on the idea that social historians' techniques of closelytextured research can play a key role in the elaboration of world historical developments. World historians, meanwhile, can advance their own goals by grounding what has been largely a theoretical field by digging deeply into local stories. To accomplish this methodological alchemy, 1 combine archival work into the social and intellectual history of the movement to pass the West Ordinance with a wide-ranging synthetic reading of trends in urban history throughout the West and the expanding world of Western colonialism, especially highlighting trends in India and South Africa. The early twentieth century witnessed a planet-wide proliferation of residentially segregated cities designed to uphold racial hierarchies. Colonial regimes like that of the British in Sierra Leone were the biggest builders of these divided cities. The tradition began in the late seventeenth century when the British East India Company officially designated separate walled sections of its capital at Madras, India as "White Town" and "Black Town." In the nineteenth century the British and then other European imperial powers developed new techniques of urban segregation, laying out separate districts for Europeans and "natives" in literally hundreds of cities, especially in the aftermath of the Creat Uprising of 1856 in India, and then again after the Scramble for Africa. The project culminated in the early 20th century, in what Janet Abu Lughod called "apartheid Rabat" in French Morocco and Edwin Lutyens' capital for the British Raj at New Delhi, which had no less than five separate zones divided by color and rank. Canada, Australia, some places in the Carribean, and even Brazil saw similar segregation schemes during the same period, some successful, others less so.* But the most long-lasting of all were the locations and townships of South Africa' and the black ghettos of American cities like Baltimore,^ both of which had earlier precedents, but both of which werefirmlyand widely institutionalized in the early twentieth century as well. Baltimore's West Ordinance was not explicitly modeled on segregationist efforts in cities abroad, nor did its major proponents leave any evidence that they were specifically aware of or in touch with people leading such efforts elsewhere in the world. However, the ideological and political strategies employed by segregationists in Baltimore in 1910 were derived from and helped to augment three overlapping but distinct transnational conversations. The first of these conversations concerned the world geography of the "races"; the second concerned race and urban reform, particularly concerning public health; and the third concerned middle-class control of urban and suburban property markets. The direct participants in these conversations included colonial officials, academics, professionals, and propagandistsand many world-renowned figures could be
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counted among them. They lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic and in the far flung colonies, and sometimes traveled across all of these geographic areas. They traded ideas and argued with each other within transnational and pan-imperial institutions which they themselves built, including agencies of imperial government, professional organizations, international conferences, and scholarly journals. Tliough the three conversations on race, reform, and property were themselves not always centrally focused on urban racial segregation, all three provided essential ideological ammunition for local efforts to create racially separate residential districts in one way or another in cities on virtually every inhabited continent of the earth during this period. Sometimes, most often in European colonies, the transnationally connected experts themselves took personal leadership roles in implementing plans to replicate segregated cities in new locations. In Baltimore, the most prominent experts generally held back, and local residential segregationists came from professions that were, at most, only indirectly involved in the process of creating and diffusing new knowledge on race, urban reform, and property markets. The proponents of the Baltimore segregation ordinances were thus amateurs, but as such they tapped into the conversations of internationally connected experts informally, either by reading their work or absorbing knowledge second hand through conversations with each other and through popular media. National, regional, and local conditions determined which ideas the Baltimore segregationists embraced with greatest vigorlike the idea that "commingled races" were inherently prone to conflict and the idea that blacks brought down declining property valuesas well as the ones they received somewhat more lukewarmly, such as the equation of blacks with disease. The worldwide diffusion of ideas about racial geography, urban reform, and property markets thus provide the transnational intellectual and institutional contexts in which to formulate comparative insights about the segregation of cities across the world during this period of convergence, when segregation came to placesIndia, West Africa, South Africa, and the United States among othersthat had otherwise starkly differing political, institutional, economic, demographic, and cultural histories. Finally, when read with transnational contexts in mind, the social historical record of the events surrounding the ordinance suggests how innovations created during the course of segregating US cities had important significance elsewhere in the world.
Questions of space have always been critical to the idea of race. Race, after all, came into intellectual prominence as a concept during the late eighteenth century as part of inquiries into the world geography of human difference. In discussions which spanned Europe, the Americas, and the colonies, academics, colonial officials, and propagandists on either side of the slavery question debated the merits of separation of the races largely on two geographic scales, the macro-scale of the continentwhether it was suitable for races from one part of the world to live on continents deemed to be "natural habitats" of others and the micro-scale of intimate relationshipswhether it was a good thing for
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people of different races to reproduce and create mixed-race peoples.' The idea that cities should have separate sections for the races helped resolve some of the ideological problems that arose in these debates. In India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British faced critics who felt that Anglo Saxons risked racial degeneration by getting too intimate with Indians and by spending too much time in tropical climates unsuitable for whites. One response was a vast expansion their early modern Black Town/White Town model, including the development of segregated military cantonments for soldiers, separate civil lines for administrators, and hill stations such as cool, foggy Simla, in the foothills of Himalayas, a kind of ersatz English country town where a large segment of the British Raj decamped every summer to escape the heat of Calcutta and even, some imagined, India itself. Similar ideas justified the appropriation of choice rural land for whites only in South Africa and for the idea that Africans should be kept out of cities altogether, except when rendering specific services to whites.'" In the United States, macro- and micro-segregationist notions lay at the heart of Manifest Destiny, Indian extermination and reservations, black colonization schemes, Chinese and other Asian exclusion measures, and the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act." Advocates of slavery, by contrast, had to embrace continental integration, even as they vigorously (if only theoretically) opposed sexual intermixing of races. At their most enthusiastic, they portrayed Africans' "juxtaposition" with whites in the Southern States as a divine plan to bring an inferior race in contact with the good influences of their racial superiors.'^ After emancipation, ideologues like Henry Grady grew less sanguine about the "commingling" of the races in a single region, portraying the South's "negro problem" as a unique historic cross the region had to bear. It was a situation which could only work if blacks were deprived of the vote, thus bringing them under a tutelage to whites that would more closely approximate colonialism elsewhere. For this gloomier vision, Grady drew heavily on new developments in the international scientific conversatidns on racial geography, particularly the Social Darwinian view of humankind locked in a perpetual struggle between fit and unfit races. He also worried about what he saw as an increase in the sexual assertiveness of black men, and the likelihood that it would provoke the race-instincts of whites to join lynch mobs that would undermine the economic prospects of the region. Only by depriving blacks of political ambition could the region minimize the clash of "race instincts" inevitable between differing races living in close proximity.'^ In Baltimore, these arguments were the intellectual common wisdom of the "city fathers" Dr. Lyon alluded to, the group of disfranchisers and segregationists who gathered forces in 1910 to promote the West Ordinance. In addition to Councilman West and Mayors Mahool and Preston, there were five other key players: Milton Dashiell, a lawyer who had a hand in writing every version of the law; Edgar Allen Poe, the City Solicitor (and great-nephew of the famous author) who repeatedly vouched for the constitutionality of the ordinance; William Luke Marbury, another, much more prominent lawyer who testified on behalf of the ordinance from the beginning and who helped Dashiell rewrite it twice during the spring of 1911 after it ran into trouble in the local courts; Charles H. Grasty, editor of the Baltimore News from the 1890s and, as of 1910, owner and editor of the venerable Baltimore Sun, whose progressive edito-
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rial pages bristled with endorsements for the ordinance throughout the process; and William Cahell Bruce, the prominent Maryland politician and race theorist, who played an important role in the career of most of the other players. In addition, the historical record contains smaller snippets of information ahout what we might call the grassroots of the segregation ordinance movement: some eighty-five people, including officers of neighborhood associations, letter writers, and signers of petitions. A collective biography of these men and women reveals how international conversations about racial geography and race conflict came to be understood in an American urban context, and in particular how this played out in a border-state city like Baltimore, Marylandredolent as it was of the influences of region, political party, profession, day-to-day urban existence, and the highly charged politics of a few local neighborhoods.''' Influences from abroad and contemporary world-historical analyses of the geography of the races for the most part entered the discourse on racial conflict in Baltimore through a channel largely unexplored by historians of transnational connections, that of amateur interest. Bruce, Grasty, and Marbury all traveled quite extensively on business in Europe and across North America, but the sharing or acquisition of formal expertise does not appear to have been a goal of those tripsas it was in, say, contemporary social reformers' "sociological tours" to Europe described by Daniel T. Rodgers.'^ None of the principal supporters of the West Ordinance left evidence that they visited segregated cities in Asia or Africa, as did the equally cosmopolitan Dr. Lyon. Only Grasty the newspaperman belonged to a profession that involved extensive international interchange of specialized ideas and knowledge. The lawyers who crafted the Ordinance were thus users and implementers of racial ideas that percolated to them, no doubt through many separate intellectual channels, from transoceanic debates of academics and imperialists. All of the ordinance supporters had personal or political connections with William Cabell Bruce, graduate of the University of Maryland Law School, Baltimore City Solicitor, State Representative, and later U.S. Senator. His rise as a politician began in 1891 when he elaborated Henry Grady's arguments for disfranchisement in a pamphlet entitled "The Negro Problem." Like Grady, Bruce drew freely on Social Darwinism. Something of a racist's world historical perspective frames his work. His pamphlet begins by comparing Southern whites' feelings towards blacks with the "inveterate aversion" that kept "the Englishman and the East Indian or the American and the Mongolian sullenly apart even when brought to the closest contiguity in point of space." The attorney William Luke Marbury was Bruce's closest friend in law school, and the two shared theoretical and political insights throughout their careers. Marbury, his son tells us in a memoir, often held forth in his formidable Baltimore parlor on the latest racist theories; his tastes ran to the Comte de Gobineau and, later, to Madison Grant. The editorial pages of Charles Grasty's newspapers are filled with the all the cliches of Social Darwinism and repeatedly draw on the common wisdom about white man's burden and empire. Indeed, for other middle-class Baltimoreans who joined the crusades for racial segregation ordinances, Grasty's papers must have been the most widely read analysis of race relations on a global scale.'^ On the basis of such ideas. West Ordinance supporters could propound their beliefs on race relations with a sense of certainty and universalistic scientific
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authority. In his report to Mayor Mahool asserting the constitutionality of the Ordinance, for example. City Solicitor Edgar Allen Poe maintained that "it cannot be denied at this late day that one of the greatest problems that confronts the Southern States is the negro problem" and referred readers to "irrefutable facts, well-known conditions, inherent personal characteristics and ineradicable traits of character peculiar to the races, close association on a footing of absolute equality is utterly impossible between them, wherever negroes exist in large numbers in a white community, and invariably leads to irritation, friction, disorder, and strife."'^ That said. West Ordinance supporters also elaborated their ideas about race conflict with much more specific reference to their time and place. All of the eight most prominent supporters were born and grew up in the rural south, some, like Bruce and Marbury, on substantial post-bellum plantations. Both Bruce and Marbury left behind nostalgic remembrances of their rural youth and the supposedly friendly race relations they experienced on sharecropping plantations.'^ Many of the ordinance's grassroots supporters also seem to have hailed from among the city's well-known multitudes of dyed-in-the-wool "Southrons."'^ It was clear to all thesefigures,however, that Baltimore was no plantation. Not only had racial conflict increased since the end of slavery, but efforts to deal with this problem through disfranchisement were frustrated by the urban politics of Baltimore itself.^ Many of the West Ordinance supporters, Marbury, Bruce, and Poe foremost among them, had labored long to deprive blacks of the vote in Maryland, without success. The issue dominated state politics from about 1901 to 1911, but the state legislature three times narrowly voted down disfranchising amendments. In all of these campaigns, the city of Baltimore played an important role in making things difficult. Unlike other southern cities, Baltimore harbored many Republicanthe most loyal of whom, black people, stood to lose their voteand also a large population of recent immigrants from Europe, who were understandably worried that their franchise would be the next to be written off. Blacks had also organized into a considerable political force, first under the indomitable leadership of Reverend Lyon, then by electing a succession of black city councilors, then by founding a branch office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which included among its ranks a fearless star lawyer named W. Ashbee Hawkins. Making things worse for the disfranchisers, Maryland's Democratic Party was itself divided over support for the notoriously corrupt Gorman-Rasin machine, which dominated both state and local politics at the turn of the century and which had nakedly sought to use disfranchisement to eliminate the votes of white reformist Democrat detractors as well as blacks. Meanwhile, a Jim Crow rail coach law did squeak through the Maryland legislature in 1904 despite the heroic and nearly successful resistance efforts of Dr. Lyon on the eve of his departure to Liberia. A boycott and a lawsuit by well-to do blacks from Maryland and Washington D.C. later restricted it to intra-state travel only. Other Jim Crow statutes, such as a Baltimore City trolley segregation ordinance, languished into the mid-1910s, with the NAACP and Ashbee Hawkins fighting them every step of the way.^' By 1910, the leaders of Maryland's disfranchisement movement were licking their wounds, none perhaps more so than William Marbury, who had once sought to parlay his dogged efforts against the Democratic machine, Republi-
THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 673 cans, and negroes into a U.S. Senate seat. Then the vagaries of urban racial politics struck again, when NAACP lawyer W. Ashbee Hawkins bought a house in Baltimore's Northwest Side. Marbury, Dashiell, West, and Poe all lived in this neighborhood, which lay a little over a mile from downtown. It had earlier picked up the nickname "favored fan" because its elegant streets angled away f^rom the city's north-south grid at fortyfivedegrees, and because it occupied the crest of a hill then called Mount Royal, which once allowed its wealthy residents to occupy the physical as well as the social summit of the city. By 1910, though, Baltimore had expanded dramatically outward from its historic core, pressing up against what had once been a distant suburb. Many of the city's most prominent residents, including Mahool, Preston, Grasty, and Bruce, had chosen even fancier neighborhoods to live in, such as Mount Vernon, whose housing prices were considered safely beyond the means of the wealthiest blacks, or the more distant suburb of Roland Park, an exclusive development that Grasty had helped finance and that for a while even contained a street named after him.^^ Baltimore's growth reflected, in great part, the expansion of its already relatively substantial black population, which by 1910 numbered around 80,000 and was the country's second biggest after New Orleans. During thefirstdecades of the century, large numbers of black people had moved into an area adjoining the "favored fan" to the southwest. Most were poor, and they crowded into congested places like Biddle Alley, which emptied into Druid Hill Avenue, the southern boundary of the Northwest Side, a street which had become largely black itself. Others, like the NAACP's W. Ashbie Hawkins and his law partner George E McMechen, were well-to-do enough to afford houses in the Northwest Side itself.^'' In June 1910, Hawkins bought the house at 1834 McCuUoh Street one of the diagonal spokes of the favored fanand rented it to McMechen. On July 5th, white residents of the Northwest Side gathered in a mass meeting. They founded the McCuUoh Street, Madison Avenue, and Eutaw Place Property Protective Association (MMEPPA) and were joined in their protest shortly afterward by numerous similar groups, including the Northwest Improvement Association of Baltimore, and the Harlem Improvement Association, based in another white middle-class neighborhood nearby where Hawkins himself had settled.^^ Petitions began circulating throughout the neighborhoods for immediate help from the city, calling for segregation to stop the "negro invasion" of the Northwest Side. The idea of separating blacks from whites in cities was relatively new in the field of racial geography and race war in the South, and it reflected characteristically urban concerns. Baltimore's difficult border-state politics were not the only thing that distinguished the city from paternalists' illusions of Old South plantations and their harmonious racial "juxtaposition." In the wake of emancipation, the growth of cities all across the South challenged old racial verities. In slave cities, racial separation had been unthinkablelarge neighborhoods set aside for blacks would have quickly become organizing grounds for slave revolts which could have overthrown the whole "peculiar institution." As William Cabell Bruce had suggested in his tract "The Negro Problem", the big threat cities posed to most Old South paternalists even well after emancipation was the distance blacks elected to put between themselves and whites, not the proximity of the races. In the post-emancipation city, though, new problems arose. On
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plantations and in small rural towns, everyone knew everyone and social hierarchies were clear, even when variations in skin color sometimes made race itself ambiguous. In the anonymous spaces of the city, as Grace Elizabeth Hale has argued blacks could challenge their "place" in the racial hierarchy simply by purchasing markers of class, such as elegant clothes or vehicles. Or, if they had light skin, they could elude the radar of "one-drop" rules and pass as white. Also, an ambiguous sexual charge pervaded daily life in cities, as unacquainted blacks and whites apprized each other on sidewalks or jostled each other in trolley cars or the aisles of stores. The threat to whites intensified as some blacks achieved professional positions that technically put them on a par with members of the white urban elite, and even more so when they purchased that most powerful a symbol of social status, a house in an elite neighborhood.^^ Jim Crow ordinances segregating rail and trolley cars, theaters, restaurants and other public amenities signaled Southern whites'finalrejection of physical proximity as a method of social control, and their embrace of distance. While white Baltimoreans struggled to implement such laws, they also morefirmlyclosed off access to the social clubs and the professional societies that might have allowed Negro lawyers and doctors to better establish their reputations. They also warily watched the housing market for signs of racial conflict, for vandalism and "near riots" had broken out on previous occasions when blacks had moved into other white, mostly working class, neighborhoods.^' When Hawkins and McMechen, two black lawyers who had helped wrestle disfranchisement to its death, then performed a boldflankingmove around Jim Crow strictures and broke the color line around the "favored fan," the threat to exclusive white privilege was too much to bear. West, Dashiell, Poe, and Marbury in particular must have wondered at times whether their own biological racial instincts were summoning them to fight back. "It is humiliating and annoying to the white residents of this neighborhood to have them here," wrote an assembly of white homeowners to Baltimore's mayor.^^ Abstract concepts like inevitable racial conflict clearly achieved a deeply personal meaning to whites whose bastions of prestige were being "invaded." In the case of white lawyers like West, Poe, Marbury, and especially Dashiell, professional rivalries with their black counterparts palpably inflected the exchanges they traded in print.^' In their public pronouncements, the most prominent supporters of the Ordinance avoided explicitly raising the specter of interracial sex or the threat of black men raping white women, a theme so widespread in southern politics at the time. No doubt their language of the inherent conflicts of "commingled" races allowed them to maintain their reformist high gtound while evoking a more fire-eating, sexualized imagery anyway. Grassroots supporters were also, for the most part, similarly restrained, though one wrote of his concern that the conversion of a previously white school to use for blacks would both encourage the rise in black homeownership in the Northwest Side and create a situation where "large colored boys and girls would come into daily touch with the girls who attended Western High School," a particularly jealously guarded all-white jewel in the neighborhood's crown.^" The undertow of racial panic and a sense of impending race war are palpable, though, especially at three key moments. Thefirstoccurred on July 4th of 1910
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shortly after McMechen moved in, when a great disaster stuck the "white race" in Reno, Nevada. In a prizefight monitored carefully in the Baltimore press, across the U.S., South Africa, and in nervous colonial offices around the world, the black boxer Jack Johnson, defiant public consort of white women and flamboyant displayer of his wealth and fame, soundly defeated the white champion Jim Jeffries. Riots broke out across the U.S. as whites expressed their humiliation by attacking and lynching blacks indiscriminately, often right in the open in city streets. Baltimore Mayor Mahool, like local officials across the country and elsewhere in the world, immediately took action to stop the showing of newsreels of the fight in the city's movie houses. The very next day, July 5th, was the day the MMEPPA met for the first time to push for legal action against the "Negro invasion."^' Then, three years later, during the summer of 1913, Ashbee Hawkins used a test case to convince a Court of Appeals to void the third version of the ordinance on a technical point, and Mayor Preston was unable to assemble city council to return from vacation to pass a new law. Neighborhood associations sent a flood of letters and petitions to Preston's office ruing Marbury's incompetence and replete with warnings of "invasion," "lawlessness," "racial antagonism and animosity, conflict and disorder," as well as "bitterness and hatred" brought about by "the forced effort to force social equality by mingling the habitations of white and black races." One letter writer, a woman who ran a novelty shop, asked Preston to "find some way short of wholesale murder to get rid of the invaders."^^ Finally, in 1917 and 1918, as it sunk in that the Buchanan decision made it virtually impossible to craft a new ordinance that would fly in the courts, distraught homeowners once again put pen to paper with their fears, wondering angrily if "the White People [Are] to be Driven out of Baltimore?" and warning that "this city will soon be a second Darkest Africa." One particularly active woman even fired a letter off to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, demanding to know "if the whole country was to be given over to the colored "^^
The idea that the segregation ordinance "Should Bring Peace" between the races helped its supporters both narrowly and on a more exalted level. Most narrowly, racial conflict rhetoric helped segregationists' legal case. Matters of public order fell under the city's legitimate use of police power. According to supporters, the race conflicts that threatened to engulf the city were sufficient to justify strong measures on the part of municipal government. Furthermore, they argued, the West Ordinance met the test for constitutional limitations on police powers because bore a "reasonable relation to the exigency leading to its passage." The specter of racial conflict also allowed City Solicitor Edgar Allen Poe to argue the continuity between legalized residential segregation and antimiscegenation and Jim Crow statutes, which the Supreme Court had already validated, most famously in Plessy v. Ferguson.^'^ On a grander note. West Ordinance supporters used arguments from the global conversations on racial geography to give their crusade a sense of statesmanship
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and the high moral ground of moderation. As they had argued in disfranchisement campaigns, the Ordinance did the local work needed to address a problem with a scope much larger than Baltimore and its neighborhoods. Indeed, the law's supporters could portray themselves as the only sensible players in a world dominated by those on one extreme who wanted to arm blacks with the voting power they needed to escalate racial conflict and extremists on the other side who spoiled for a chance to eliminate Africans on American soil through racial Armageddon or gradual extinction. The means the self-styled reformers chose for their racial crusade, residential segregation, inherently involved the manipulation of urban space. West Ordinance supporters were not alone in thinking of urban space as a great problem solver. This was an era when the structure of cities inspired the imagination of hosts of reformist visionaries the world over, people who thought urban spaces could express the greatest aspirations of civilization and who also had growing faith in humans' capacity to solve millennia-old urban problems. By 1910, numerous groups of well-organized professionals and officials had grown deeply interested in ways that urban space might be altered to end urban vice, corruption, crime, political unrest, and disease. Since they were also deeply tapped into questions about racial matters, and since urban problems could be so easily coupled with ideas about the dangers of race conflict, mixing, and degeneration, they often spoke of urban problems in racialized ways.''^ In many parts of the world the separation of the races was thus seen as a necessary step in solving urban problems and a fundamental principal of ambitious plans to transform the shape of cities. Baltimore became a center of this racialized urban reformist sentiment, and the city's public health reformers, who specialized in the prevention of tuberculosis, were especially influential on an international scale. The city's historians have often assumed that proponents of the segregation ordinance promoted the law as a public health measure, designed to spread the spread of tuberculosis from black slums to white neighborhoods.^* That is to some extent true. For example, the same editorial in the Sun that proclaimed the Ordinance a guarantor of racial peace also assured readers that the measure would "contribute to the health and efficiency of the colored population." The rawer sentiment that negroes endangered the health of whites was quite common among grassroots supporters of segregation as well.^' However, looked at in transnational perspective, it is clear that Baltimore's segregationistsdespite their self-image as reformers and despite their interest in changing urban spacedid not make the kinds of deep ties with other urban reformers as their counterparts did elsewhere in the world. The relative political distance they maintained also reveals some big limits in the extent to which West Ordinance supportersand American urban racial segregationists in generalever thought about reshaping cities according to grand spatial designs. The urban reformers with the most impact on the proliferation of urban racial segregation worldwide were people concerned with disease: doctors, medical researchers, public health practitioners, and sanitation experts. These professions organized along transnational lines relatively early in the nineteenth century, and their conferences and journals were heavily preoccupied by the idea that urban disease, whether carried by miasmas, infections, or contagions, could be
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stopped by isolating different groups of people from one another, whether by quarantine, in sanatoria, or in separate residential zones of a city. "Segregation" was originally a medico-scientific term describing the separation of chemical substances from one another in experiments, and it later emerged as a term to designate the isolation of human sources of disease. Public health officials also pioneered the use of disease mapping to identify the location of the sources of disease. These linguistic and technical innovations lent themselves well to racialized conceptions of public health: non-Europeans were the source of disease, and separating Europeans from natives in cities, especially tropical ones, would solve a major dilemma of empire, the high death rate of European colonial officials. Some of the world's greatest scientists traded in these ideas, the most important being Ronald Ross, the discoverer of the connection between mosquitos and malaria, who praised programs of European segregation in India and West Africa.^^ In addition, sanitarians spearheaded the idea that urban slums should be regulated or cleared altogether, a program which would have enormous impact on the shape of cities and on the techniques and politics of racial separation in many places worldwide. Such thinking was critical in the development of separate European districts in India and elsewhere in the tropical colonies. On the advice of sanitation experts, colonial authorities and engineers sited these enclaves upwind from "native" residential zones, and architects filled the "White Towns" with widelyspaced bungalows whose ventilation systems were scientifically designed to the dispel bad air and germs imagined to be emanating from across the color line. Hill Station in Freetown, Sierra Leone represented a new advance in this field made possible by Ross's identification of mosquitoes as the vector for malaria germs, and the idea that African bodies, customs, and neighborhoods were particularly likely to generate both germs and mosquitos. The site for Hill Station was selected by calculating the distance a mosquito could fly from the African town, adding altitude for good measure. Authorities in South Africa used similar arguments, which historian Maynard Swanson dubbed the "sanitation syndrome," amidst outbreaks of other infectious diseases, as a pretext for the establishment of African locations on the outskirts of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, and Johannesburg. In Johannesburg, sanitarians linked the health problems of slums to blacks, coloreds, and Asians, and referred to the imperatives of public health to clear those inner-city slums and remove their inhabitants to racially separate ex-urban townships. The same logic justified the provision of much higher-standard suburban public housing for working-class and poor whites.''^ In the United States, the sanitation syndrome had a widespread impact on urban social politics as well, first on the West Coast, where opponents of Chinese immigration regularly compared the influx of Asians itself to a pestilence. In cities such as San Francisco, public health officials helped fan anti-Chinese sentiment to pass the country's first urban segregation laws restricting the spread of Chinatown, and at one point even threatened to remove the whole Chinese population to an industrial suburb. If the courts had not intervened, they would have created the closest thing in the United States to a South African township.''" Baltimore had already become a site of considerable significance for discus-
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sions of urban sanitation and race by the 1880s. Then, Baltimore doctors like Edward Gilliam and William Lee Howard had played key roles in a national debate on a question critical to race conflict theory: whether the black population was actually growing despite its inherent inferiority, thus threatening to wrest control of North America; or decreasing, as the theory of the survival of the fittest would predict, to the point of racial extinction. The influential writer Frederick L. Hoffman resolved this debate in favor of racial extinction by mustering new-fangled vital statistics collected by municipal health commissions, including Baltimore's, to show that blacks' greater propensity for vice and disease had increased their death rates since slavery. Segregation, he and Howard had argued, was the only way to ensure that blacks' inevitable doom did not extend to whites."" Baltimore made a truly international mark on this subject in thefirstdecade of the twentieth century when the city's Municipal Health Commission teamed up with the John Hopkins Medical School to launch an international exposition on the prevention of tuberculosis. Because of the involvement of John Hopkins, the exposition could draw on the clout of two the world's most celebrated doctors, William Osier and William Welch, who were credited with bringing European standards of training to the United States, and who had also helped found the Laennec Society, based at the University, the first national association devoted to the study of tuberculosis. The exposition toured across the U.S., traveled to points in Canada and Mexico, climaxed at the International Conference on Tuberculosis in Washington D.C. in 1908, and from there resonated "throughout Great Britain and her colonies" according to a prominent New York sanitarian. Exhibit A in the exposition was a map of Baltimore peppered with dots representing deaths from tuberculosis in the city. The dots converged into a black mass centered on Biddie Alley, the "lung block," part of the Negro slum across Druid Hill Avenue from the Northwest Side's favored fan. Viewers probably didn't need Baltimore's Deputy Health Commissioner C. Hampson Jones to tell them what the map implied, that !'the prevalence of this disease amongst the colored people is a great menace to our white population.'"*^ By 1910, such fears were still fresh enough, and they do appear to have been on the minds of grassroots supporters. Petitions from neighborhood associations routinely included health concerns in their lists of problems caused by negroes. Since guaranteeing the public health was one of the municipal obligations which justified the use of city police powers, health concerns also made their way into legal briefs filed on behalf of the ordinance. As late as 1918, a full year after the law had been declared unconstitutional. Mayor Preston still received letters from pro-ordinance homeowners who railed against the horrors of the alleyways and kept tabs on the count of black tuberculosis deaths."*^ Still, the "sanitation syndrome" played a decidedly secondary role in the rhetoric of the segregation ordinance's most prominent backers, and, for their part, the city's most prominent doctors and sanitarians never went on public record in clear support of the Ordinance. In part, this may reflect a problem in the argument's own tortuous racial logic, a problem public health-based arguments for segregation also faced in India, South Africa, and everywhere else they were used. As many contemporary Baltimoreans noted, if black people were the cause
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of disease, then the biggest problem facing whites was black household servants, not black neighbors. In Baltimore such servants routinely commuted from places like Biddle Alley to places like William Marbury's house on Lanvale Street, which employed no less than six black servants. Black laundresses washed and folded many prominent white Baltimoreans' very clothes, towels, and bed sheets, often in their overcrowded alleyway hovels. Who could be sure that "infected sputum" didn't make its way directly into the private sanctums of the "favored fan" through that route? Framers of the West Ordinance, like residential colorline drawers going back to Madras, had made an exception for live-in black servants, who could have access to the most intimate reaches of white people's houses. If health concerns did not move whites to forego these services, how could they argue that keeping blacks from living in separate houses, even on their street, would help prevent tuberculosis?'*'' Furthermore, some asked, wouldn't it make more sense to provide better housing for blacks than to segregate them? The celebrated Baltimore contrarian (and inveterate racist) H.L. Mencken argued as much in an unpublished column attacking the West Ordinance:
Who ever heard of a plan for decent housing for negroes in Baltimore? . . . The persons who govern us have never looked into this matter. When the darky now tries to move out of his sty into and into human habitation a policeman now stops him. The law practically insists that he keep on incubating typhoid and tuberculosis . . . for the delight and benefit of the whole town"
Gertainly Mencken was tight that reformers in Baltimore did little to improve conditions for blacks. Their exposes of other urban evils, like alleyway housing, prostitution, and crime, mostly reinforced the idea that blacks were constitutionally more prone to poverty, immorality and disease, and that they would bring those problems with them, like a contagion, wherever they moved. Suggestions for housing reform mostly focused on closing alleyways and clearing slums, a prescription which progressive city planners and William Welch did publically endorse.''^ No doubt the most prominent West Ordinance supporters knew that talk of slum-clearance would only get them stuck in quagmires they'd prefer to avoid. First of all, black leaders themselves played up the alleyway issue: how could Ordinance supporters claim to have the welfare of Negroes in mind if they expected even the most prominent leaders of the black community to live in filth when they could afford to live more decently? Secondly, closing up alleyways would only put more pressure on the housing of the Northwest Side, not less. When authorities had cleared a black slum for the Gamden Railroad Station earlier in the century, the process only forced more blacks to move into the Druid Hill Avenue area. Thirdly, slum clearance touched on the political third rail of property rights: American courts were much more solicitous of slumlords' interests than those elsewhere in the world. Andfinally,as Mencken had implied, no one among the conservative Ordinance supporters (or for that matter among most progressive housing reformers) wanted to contemplate the expense, let alone the specter of socialism, involved in building public housing for blacks.'*' No grand vision of city space emerged from the imaginations of early-century Baltimore segregationists as it would among the architects of Rabat, New Delhi,
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or South African urban apartheid. No one jumped on board, for example, when in 1911 Baltimore's city planner William Emmart, who himself lived on the Northwest Side, proposed a comprehensive city plan which included alleyway closings and "wide boulevards connecting together the various parks or 'squares' of [the Northwest Side] ... and with Eutaw Place"probably, as Emmart suggested, because of the jump in "tax rate" that would be needed to finance the scheme."* The Sun limited itself to weakly responding to black homeowners that "Baltimore is large enough to provide suitable opportunities for the expansion of both races" and that they could find "decent sanitary residences" within the many blocks set aside by the Ordinance for black residence alone."" Indeed, looking back through the changes that occurred in American cities since the era of segregation ordinances, it is important to remember that the West Ordinance supporters did not even envision the creation of anything resembling a clearly defined or contiguous black ghetto, unlike the creators of contemporary colonial "black towns" and South African locations. If left to stand, and if the black population had not increased as dramatically as it did throughout the century, the law might have created something familiar in many other Southern cities at the time: a racial patchwork with substantial numbers of at least theoretically mixed blocks. It was not until the emergency of the Great Depression, when the federal government underwrote an expanded program of slum clearance and segregated public housing projects for those displaced, that the sanitation syndrome had a huge impact on the overall design of the American city and the growth of the American ghetto.' In the 1910s, American segregationists' relationship with reformers who had bigger urban visions in mind was much more opportunistic. To the extent that fears of "black plagues" animated their supporters, the sanitation syndrome played into their hands. And to the extent that reform sentiment provided political cover, it could be useful. If prominent reformers never endorsed the ordinance, they did not publically lift a finger against it either: among whites only a small group of socialists opposed it once the initial kinks were worked out.'' When in triumph, progressive elites joined in organizing the first CityWide Congress of Baltimore, on three days in March, 1911, as segregationists geared up to push for yet another version of the West Ordinance, their collective stand must have been clear to the black community. Johns Hopkins Medical School luminary Dr. William H, Welch shared vice-presidential duties, and later the lectern, with the "negro problem" theorist William Cabell Bruce. The MMEPPA, the Northwest Improvement Association, the Harlem Improvement Association, and no less than twenty-seven other white neighborhood homeowner groups were all cordially invited, but no black minister, city councilman, or any representative of the NAACR On days like those, racial segregationists could camouflage themselves cozily amongst Baltimore's grand crusaders for urban reform,'^
* * * * *
On most other days, Baltimore segregationists were much less interest in grand city-wide plans than on retaining a quality of their own neighborhood, that is.
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its racial exclusivity, and on individualistic concerns, getting a return on their investments in their own homes. The argument that "the proximity of the Negro race to good property means its undoing" was hy far the most oft-repeated mantra of segregationists, from the leadership to the grassroots.^^ It clearly gave the movement its higgest political draw. Supporters of the Ordinance, especially those from the grassroots, almost always followed up their rhetoric of "hlack peril" derived from racial theory and "black plague" derived from urban reformism with reflections on the black threat to property. When segregationists did translate their highly local and personal concerns into a vision of the city, theirs was not a city suffused with the "cooperative" spirit reformers' called for so resoundingly at their Congress, nor was it a city that even communicated clear lessons about racial hierarchies, as segregationists in India and South Africa contemplated at the same time. Instead, as we shall see, theirs was a city as self-promoter and competitor, a bloodied contestant in a zero-sum race against other cities for resources and growth. In this way. West Ordinance supporters helped forge a mindset central to American urban policy throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. As part of that legacy, the property values argument ironically both spelled the death of municipal segregation ordinances themselves, and deeply inspired the longer-term success of American segregationism by other means. Despite these differences, racial arguments about property values in general developed in the context of conversations of an international scope that, once again, involved professionals and propagandists in Europe, the colonies, and across the Americasconversations which in this case were critical to the very creation of capitalist housing markets. These conversations concerned the definition of desirable urban real estate for the middle class and also arguments over the best means to protect middle-class investors in that valued real estate from various sorts of threats. As Robert Fishman has shown, these debates go back at least to late-eighteenth century London, where evangelical moralists touted the virtues of bourgeois enclaves in the city's first suburbs.'"* Contemporary merchants in British India also promoted the value of life on the urban fringe, in their case by using free-market arguments against the East India Company's monopoly on outlying real estate in Asian colonial cities. There they successfully convinced authorities to make grants of semi-rural land for "garden houses" and even to foot the bill for wider carriage roads designed to facilitate the daily commute between the fringe and the business district of places like Madras's White Town.^^ Such ideas later made their way via London to the Americas through the international professional connections of architects, developers, and later urban planners. Along the way, they helped foster the development of such quasi-suburbs as Baltimore's favored fan itself, platted out in the
5
Fishman and others have argued that gender and class segregation were critical to establishing the desirability and the property values of the urban fringe. Racial threats to the value of investing in "bourgeois Utopias" became an increasing concern as the nineteenth century wore on, first in India, then in South Africa and the U.S., when black urban populations there began to grow quickly towards the end of the nineteenth century. The precise idea that non-whites could threaten white property played a different role in local segregation cam-
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paigns across the world, however, depending first upon the extent and nature of white urban property ownership, and secondly on the legal context in which governments could act in protection of whites and within which non-Europeans could resist state-sponsored segregation. In India and later West Africa, the European merchants and colonial officials who invested in the relatively small private suburban housing markets generally did not plan on remaining there long, let alone settle their families there for generations. In fact, most whites in in suburban civil lines and cantonments did not own the houses they lived in at all; the Raj provided the typically temporary shelter there as partial payment colonial service." At times, the Raj was called upon to protect white investors fearful of Indian neighbors, such as in the privately-owned hill station of Simla during the 1890s. State action in those cases was ruthless, directed by the law of conquest, and unbound by what one commissioner called "sentimental reasons of freedom of movement and politicoeconomic reasons of liberty of trade." But even there, state action and white grassroots pressure never sustained itself in the way it would in the U.S. or South Africa. Easter steam ships ultimately made the trip home to England just as easy and much more desirable than a summer stay in the hill stations, underscoring Britons' relative lack of commitment to real estate investments in India. Independence movements in Asia and Africa of course eventually sent most of all the whites in a "White Town" home by the middle of the twentieth century.'^ In South Africa, by contrast, urban Africans faced a white settler population that invested in real estate with future generations in mind, and which was eventually able to persuade the quasi-colonial state to use the law of conquest against any assertion of black property rights. In 1913, as Baltimore finally passed the third version of its beleaguered Ordinance on city blocks. South Africa passed the Native Lands Act, which separated the whole country, rural as well as urban, by race, and envisaged nationwide measures of urban "influx control" designed to keep the vast majority of blacks on rural reserves. In such a climate, arguments about black threats to property values do seem to have flourished, though they have yet to be the subject of intensive research. Just as in some southern cities of the United States, for example, racially restrictive covenants appeared in real estate deeds of properties in Johannesburg's new suburbs as early as the 1890s. However, in the more repressive environment. South African authorities used the sanitation argument more readily than in places like Baltimore. The state was also more able to circumvent organized resistance. Though African property owners often mobilized claims based on property rights to forestall dispossion of their houses in the name of segregationist schemes, white South African segregationists also backed up public health rhetoric with slum-clearance and segregated black public housing, financed not by white tax payers but by the infamously artful use of municipal monopolies on African beer sales. Diseasebased arguments were critical to the passage of the Urban (Native Areas) Act of 1923, which severely undercut black claims' to property rights, slowly strangled the Afi-ican elite, and severely eroded local anti-segregationist movements.'' In American cities such as Baltimore, with their large settled white majorities, segregationists disseminated the idea that blacks brought down property values probably more profusely than anywhere else in the world. To be sure, it could not have worked without the language of "black peril" and "black plague." But
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the property values argument also took on a life of its own. Petitioners made up statistics predicting in one case that property in the Northwest Side "would depreciate 25 per cent." An editorial in the Sun a few months later doubled that figure to 50 percent. Such calculations helped translate the neighborhood's crisis into one affecting the city as a whole, since depreciation on that scale "would mean a loss of about $600,000 in yearly taxes to the city." From there, segregationism became a part of city boosterism. In an early endorsement of the West Ordinance, the Sun wrote that
a condition of affairs exists in some sections of the city which is a distinct reproach to our city in the eyes of the outside world, and not only injurious to the social and business interests of the people of those sections more particularly affected, but vastly injurious to the reputation of the city as a whole as a place of residence.
In November of 1910, a city-wide census revealed that Baltimore's population had fallen behind that of Cleveland, moving the city down a notch from the fifth largest in the country to the sixth, and the idea spread that people were avoiding the city because its prominent residents had failed to do something to keep its large black population in check.*' Others despaired about the legacy of the urban improvements the city was making: "We are building a fine city, with civic centres, boulevards, monuments, etc., to be occupied by the colored people when we all move to the suburbs. Why all these blessings? Are they the favorite people?" "Have the colored people the right of eminent domain?" asked another frantic letter writer.'^^ By May of 1911, though, the Sun was reassuring Baltimoreans that "the best advertisement Baltimore has had in the last decade is the West Segregation Ordinance, as witnessed by the nation-wide interest shown by other municipalities in this law." Such concern with Baltimore's competitive position, and pride for "this fair city on the Chesapeake" may have been real, but the Ordinance supporters' main concern was clear, as the very name of the MMEPPA, a Property Protection Association, attested. The identity of "Property Owner Of Baltimore City," as one letter-writer typed under his signature, was the glue that brought their otherwise fairly diverse ranks togetheror, as another letter-writer chose to call herself, summing up the tone of three years of petitions that flooded city hall, "Property Ownerand Sufferer."*'' Once they accepted the idea that blacks would lower property values, it is clear that all of the petitioners did really have a lot to lose. Almost all of the eighty grassroots petitioners and letter-writers who left their identities in the public record in support of the West Ordinance lived in clusters closest to areas where black middle class people had bought homes. After lawyers, the largest occupational group among these supporters were secretaries and clerks, people who would have especially felt the weight of the period's burdensome mortgages and who would have been particularly concerned to guard whatever equity they had acquired in their house. Other large groups included medium-sized business owners and shop owners, some of whose businesses doubled as homes and who thus worried about risk to both; medical doctors, most of whose homes doubled as offices; and preachers, who worried out loud in their letters about losing their denomination's investment in expensive church buildings.*'
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It was thus the city's "middling sort" that pushed the Ordinance through. Though some of Baltimore's bluest bloods, including about seventeen out of the fifty-three Officers and Members of the Executive Committee of the reformist City-Wide Congress, still lived in the Northwest Side, most of the most prominent citizensblue-chip firm attorneys, bank presidents, top university officials and professors, and owners of heavy industrial corporations, the big tobacco houses, and downtown hotelslived well to the east or north of the color line, whether in Mount Vemon, Roland Park, or in the surrounding countryside. Many of the wealthier people who did live in the neighborhood may have also held somewhat less of a proportion their total assets in their homes, and had more flexibility to move out with a gain. Whatever the economics of the situation, it appeared to many, including black observers, that the true uppercrust of Baltimore had decided to stand above the fray of racial politics, issuing grand sentiments about urban reform, while they relied on their clerks and secretariesand maybe a few angry Southrons like Marbury and Grastyto do the bulk of the dirty work of segregating the town,^^ Real estate agents played a more ambiguous role in the movement, which differed from that historians have described in other cities during the 1920s. For the most part real estate agents were not instrumental in founding the neighborhood associations that pushed the West Ordinance, Most were founded in the 1880s, long before fears of black invasion, and served other purposes. The MMEPPA may have been an exceptiona real estate agent was among the petitioners, and he may have had a hand in organizing the group, as many agents did in cities across the country after 1920. Charles Grasty was heavily involved in the real estate business in the 1890s, and acquired the capital he used to buy the News and Sun through his involvement in the development of the suburb of Roland Park, Mayor J, Barry Mahool later became a major player in Baltimore real estate. However, only two other real estate agents are on record of having joined in the petitions or any of the protective associations. The venerable Baltimore Real Estate Exchange stayed out of the fray entirely, at least publically, perhaps imitating the behavior of most of its members' generally more prestigious and business customers. As in segregationist efforts elsewhere, some "unscrupulous real estate men" were also actually the target of many white property owners' anger, for "blockbusting" sales of houses in white neighborhoods to blacks,*' The "real estate men" who were most active in the debate actually protested against the first version of the West Ordinance, and precisely because it threatened their property values. These were the owners of speculative property in mixed blocks which were majority white at the time of the ordinance, blocks which under thefirstversion of the law would be considered white blocks. "Even though there may be colored people on either side of a vacant house," they complained, "the owner is, according to the terms of this ordinance, compelled to rent it to white people," a very unlikely prospect, "or hold it vacant. Is this booming Baltimore? It does not appear that way to me." Such complainants took pains to explain that they adamantly supported segregation, if in different form.* They got their way, when the third version of the ordinance, which Mahool signed on May 15th, 1911, dropped all references to mixed blocks. The biggest role of real estate agents in the segregation of Baltimore appears to have been in the development of racially restrictive covenants, not the seg-
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regation ordinance. Historians consider Baltimore's Roland Park to be among the forerunners of the restriction movement, since its developers Fredrick Law Olmstead Jr., Edward Bouton, and Gharles Grasty placed numerous restrictions on the land use and architectural style on the properties there. However, they shied away from racial covenants on the advice of their lawyers who feared such clauses would run counter to the 14th Amendment. When the same developers opened the neighboring subdivision of Guilford in 1910, as the ferment on the West Ordinance began, they felt emboldened enough to include restrictions on resale to Negroes to the deeds, in a pattern that may have reflected a practice already common in other Southern cities. Still, the practice was not widely known in Baltimore even as late as 1917, when Mayor Preston, who lived in Mount Vernon, responded to disappointed letters from Ordinance supporters by consulting a friend active in Chicago's real estate circles. Tlie advice the Mayor received from the Windy City was to organize block associations to promote restrictive covenants. The Real Estate Exchange of Baltimore apparently had not yet considered this idea, but they soon endorsed a city-wide campaign, and William Marbury, among many others, enlisted his young son in the new cause, sending him to go door to door among the neighbors of the Northwest Side with the latest idea about how to keep negroes out.^' If the property values argument was the most effective of the three lines of argument in developing political support for the West Ordinance, in the end, unlike the racial conflict argument, it did little to advance the law's cause in the courts. Milton Dashiell's original draft of the Ordinance which bore the title "An ordinance for preserving order, securing property values and promoting the great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore City" was dismissed by the court precisely because securing property values was outside the purview of the city's police powers, and future versions of the law dropped that phrase. But bigger legal issues were at stake. Residential segregation ordinances ultimately fell to the argument that they interfered with individuals' right to dispose of property as they saw fita legal concept deeply embedded in the common law, interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and central to laissez-faire economic ideology. When the NAACP organized its test case against Louisville's segregation ordinance, it skillfully used the problems that arose in majority-white mixed blocks. The organization's local branch president William Warley contracted to buy a property in a block designated white that had a large minority of blacks, then refused to go ahead with the sale because it was illegal under the segregation ordinance. Charles Buchanan, the seller, who was white, then sued Warley, claiming the ordinance violated his property rights. When the state courts upheld the ordinance, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court which unanimously decided in November 1917 that "the difficult problem arising from a feeling of race hostility" was not enough of a justification to enact ordinances which "directly violat[ed] ... the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights by due process of law."^ The American career of residential segregation by municipal ordinance thus ended strangely. In a situation where whites had a strong stake in a capitals ist property market, arguments based on property values ran into the creative efforts of a black professional class who mobilized arguments based on prop-
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erty rights against it. This was something of afluke,and it should be taken as a sign of black lawyers' creativity, not the exceptionally enlightened character of American constitutionalism. In the early twentieth century neither the heroic efforts of black lawyers or even the most promising bodies of constitutional law they sought to use to their advantage were enough to make the Plessy-v. Ferguson American judiciary anything approaching an ally in the struggle against Jim Crow. However, in the limited case of municipally ordered residential segregation, the NAACP could win a significant enough victory by leveraging the Supreme Court's Loc/iner-era laissez-faire liberalism and its insistence on a constitutional right to freedom of contract against the logic of Plessy. Like slum clearance, racial segregationism was, in this particular case, limited by the American judiciary's especially fierce insistence on private property rights. In comparative perspective, the Buchanan decision was quite significant nonetheless. The question of constitutionality did continually help to undercut larger-scale segregation schemes in the U.S., such as agricultural reformer Clarence Poe's South-African style efforts to segregate the rural south, or measures to control African-American migration to the cities, as the Chicago Real Estate Board proposed in 1917, then promptly withdrew once the court spoke in Buchanan. The end of residential segregation by municipal ordinance was, to be sure, only the beginning of the story of the state intervention on behalf of black ghettoization. U.S. courts went along with restrictive covenants until 1948, and the Federal Housing Administration and other New Deal-era federal agencies positively "exhorted" segregation through racial discriminatory loanguarantee programs, transportation policy, and public housing programs until at least the early 1960s. Still, whites never got an explicit government guarantee that their neighborhoods would never be "invaded." In the absence of that guarantee, however, the idea that blacks drove down property values did become among whites a kind of "average opinion about what the average opinion will be" that placed race at the very heart of the valuation of real estate, and thus gave all white people regardless of their racial ideology an economic stake in segregation. The residential color line was thus effectively institutionalized within the very economic marrow of the market for housing. It guaranteed that the color line would remain intact, even as many urban whites lost their fight to keep their neighborhoods white in the face of expanding black ghettos.'^
Across the world at the turn of the twentieth century local segregationists cobbled together different combinations of arguments derived from the three larger conversations about the inherent conflict of commingled races, urban reform, and urban property values. The differences in these efforts of ideological bricolage reflected more than white residential patterns and legal systems, however, and this paper should be taken as an initial foray into the comparative history of urban racial segregation, not a comprehensive treatment. India, South Africa, and the United States were, of course, vastly different societies in many other respects. In colonies like India, urban segregation was much more about creating urban theaters for the display of imperial power and the health and
THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 687 comfort of a relatively small number of Europeans on relatively temporary duty than it was about control over private housing markets. In South Africa, urban segregation and later apartheid undergirded the country's migrant labor system and ultimately its police state as well as its divided property markets. Residential segregation in the United States by contrast was overwhelmingly focused on the goal of sustaining white control over urban property, especially housing. In that context, the fusing of race and property values became the touchstone of the American segregationist imagination, not segregation by city ordinance. That made American segregation no less dangerous, and in the longer run it has proved itself more durable than other forms. The marketized system of urban residential segregationalong with its consequences for unequal access to the job market, education, and transport, and for unequal exposure to environmental toxins and the criminal justice systemremains virtually unscathed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, easily cloaked inside the broader New-Right effort to sustain white privilege by denying the existence of institutionalized racial inequality. It also threatens to become a dangerous American export. As nineteenthcentury colonialism fell, to be followed at long last by South African apartheid, a new global debate about urban segregation began. It started in Western Europe, increasingly the home to its own giant urban populations of color, and then flowed elsewhere in the world's European diasporato Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and even South Africa itself. Had American-style "ghettos" somehow made their way from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to implant themselves in Paris, London, Munich, Toronto, Sydney, Sao Paulo, and Johannesburg?" The global history of urban residential segregation offers two responses to that question: One, Europeans, not Americans invented urban residential segregation by color and race. Two, this advice: instead getting mixed up in all the sensationalism about ghettos growing in your midst, focus more on the presence of racialized valuations of urban property, and learn more about the social and global historical dynamics that can bring such a system into being, Britain, with its redlining, racial steering, and increasingly racialized public housing system should serve as a good case in point. We need a new generation of Dr. Lyons to send out the warning: such an ideological virus, capable of dividing housing markets and spawning institutionalized racial inequalities, is one American product no one should seek to import.
Department of American Studies
Buffalo, NY 14260 ENDNOTES

1, "Colored Methodists Should Get Out Says Dr, Lyon in Forceful Sermon," Afro American Ledger (Baltimore), Dec 10, 1910 p. 4, 2, Stephen Frenkel and John Western, "Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation and Malarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78 (1988): 211-28; Thomas S, Gale, "Segregation in British
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West Africa," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 20 (1951) 495-507; Philip D. Curtin, "Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 600-601. 3. The first version of the West Ordinance (December 20, 1910) can be found in Baltimore City Archives, Mahool Files, #404; the fourth, and most successful version, of September 25,1913 is published in Ordinances and Resolutions of the Mayor and City Goundl of Baltimore Passed at the Annual Session 1913-1914 (Baltimore, 1914), pp. 117-19. A supplement to that version is on pp. 141-45. 4. See for examples, BCA, Mahool Files (MF) 406 Nov 5, 1910 Letter from Mayor of Roanoke, also 404 Dec 17 1910; 475 April 6, 1911, letter from Mahool to Charles Woodruff, Cebu, Philippine Islands. BCA Preston Files (PF) 21-d March 26, 1916, letter from Harry A. Kahler, Esq President, New York Title & Mortgage Co., 135 Broadway, New York City, which says "The rapid increase in the negro population in New York City is creating, in some sections of the city, very serious depreciation in real estate values, aiifecting not only individual owners of property, but the City's revenue, through falling in taxable values. We are considering whether the lead taken by your City in this matter may be taken as a guide for us, here." PF 21-d July 24, 1917 letter from Frederick Rex of Chicago Municipal Reference Library, City Hall, Chicago. The Chicago Real Estate Board discussed a measure like Baltimore's in the Ghicago Real Estate Board Bulletin, 1917, pp. 315,551. The CREB was influential in establishing the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), and remained the most important body within the larger federation for many years. 5. W Ashbie Hawkins, "A Year of Segregation in Baltimore," Crisis 3 (Nov., 1911), pp. 27-30; Roger L. Rice, "Residential Segregation by Law, 1910-1917," Joumai of Southern History 179 (1968) 179-99; Christopher Silver, "The Racial Origins of Zoning: Southern Cities from 1910-40," Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 189-205; Garrett Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style: The Segregation Ordinances of 1910-1913," Maryland Law Review 42 (1983): 289-349; Joseph L. Arnold, "Tbe Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin of Neighborhood Associations in Baltimore, 1880-191 l,"Jounia/o/Urban History 6 (1979) 3-30. Gretchen Boger, "Shifting Ground, Shifting Meaning: Baltimore's Residential Segregation Ordinances, 1910-1913," (unpublished M.A. research paper, Princeton University, 2003 generously provided to the author by Gretchen Boger). On rural segregation see Jack Temple Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 108-130; reference to influence of Baltimore on p. 123. 6. On early colonial cities and color segregation, see Carl Nightingale, "The Urban and Global Dynamics of Color Lines at Colonial Madras and New York" (unpublished paper); Thomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Towns and Cities," in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. P.J Marshall (Cambridge, U.K., 1996) pp. 242^3; Dilip K. Basu, ed. The Rise and Growth ofGolonial Port dries in Asia (Lanbam, MD, 1985). Por Madras, most of the official sources for tbe period have been published. Government of Madras, Records of Fort St. George. Diary and Gonsultation Books (Madras, 1910-53), 82 volumes covering 1672-1751; Despatches/rom England (Madras, 1911-71), 61 volumes covering 16701758; Despacc/ies to England (1670-1758) 61 vols. (Madras, 1916-32); Letters to Fort St. George, 1681-1765 45 vols. (Madras, 1916-1945); Letters from Fort. St. George 38 Vols., (Madras, 1914^6). Otber primary sources are collected in: J. Talboys Wheeler, Annab of the Madras Presidency, Beinga History of the Presidency From the First Foundation to tAe Govemorship of Thomas Pitt, Grandfather of the Earl of Chatham Compiled from Official Records (1861; Delhi, 1982); William Poster, The Founding o/Fort St. George, Madras (London,
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1902); and Henry DavisonLove, Vestiges o/0!d Madras, 1640-1800 Traced From the East India Company's Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and From Other Sources (1913; New York, 1968), 3 vols. Also, see William Foster, The Founding of Fort St. George, Madras (London, 1902); N.S. Ramaswami, Fort St. George (Madras, 1980); and Ramaswami, The Founding of Madras (Madras, 1977); Rao G.S. Srinavasachari, History of the Oity of Madras (Madras, 1939); Arjun Appadurai, "Right and Left Hand Castes in South India," Indian Economic and Social History Review, 11 (1974): 216-59; Patrick Roche, "Caste and the Merchant Government in Madras, 1639-1749" in Indian Economic and Social History Review 12 (1975): 381-407; Joseph J. Brenning, "Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel," Modem Asian Studies 11 (1977): 321-40; Susan M. Nield, "Madras: The Growth of a Colonial City in India, 1780-1840" (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1977); Susan M. Nield, "Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Modem Asian Studies 13 (1979): 217-46; Susan Nield-Basu, "The Dubashes of Madras," Modem Asian Studies 18 (1984): 1-31. On Calcutta: C.R. Wilson, ed. Old
Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing With its History (Lon-
don, 1906); P.]. Marshall, "Eighteenth-Century Calcutta," in Colonial Cities ed. Robert J. Ross and Gerald J. Telkamp (Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1985), pp. 87-104; Marshall. "British Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Bengal," Bengal, Past and Present 95 (1976): 151-63; Marshall, "British Society Under the East India Company," Modem Asian Studies 31 ((1997): 89-108; Marshall, "The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company," Modem Asian Studies 34 (2000): 307-31; Farhat Hassan, "Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698-1750," Modem Asian Studies 26 (1992): 65-82; Rev. James Long, Calcutta and Its Neighborhood: History o/Calcutta and its People from 1690-1357 (Calcutta, 1974), edited by Sankar Sen Gupta; Sukanta Chauduri, Calcutta, The Living City Volume I: The Past (Calcutta, 1990); Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta, 1978); Durba Ghosh, "Colonial Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India. 1760-1830" (Ph.D Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000); Swati Chattopadhyay, "Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of White Town in Colonial Calcutta," Journal of the Society of American Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 154-79. On Bombay: John Bumell, Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne: Being an Account of the Settlement Written by John Bumell (1710) edited by Samuel Sheppard (Cambridge, U.K., 1933); Dulcinea Correa Rodrigues, Bombay Fort in the Eighteenth Century (Bombay, 1994), pp. 58-59, 72-115; S.M. Edwardes, The. Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect (Bombay, 1902), pp. 104-109, 138, 146, 152-53, 170-78, 206, 229-238; GiUiam Tindatt, City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (London, 1982); Meera Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City (Stockholm, 1986); Dirk Kooiman, "Bombay: From Fishing Village to Colonial Port City (1662-1947)," in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 207-30. Elsewhere in Asia see: Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila; The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 38-63; Leonard Blussfi," An Insane Administration and an Unsanitary Town': The Dutch East India Company and Batavia (1619-1799)" in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 65-86; Remco Raben, "Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600-1800" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Rijkuniversiteit Leiden, 1996), pp. 162-247; Heather Sutherland; "Ethnicity, Wealth, and Power in Colonial Makassar: A Historiographical Reconsideration," in Peter J. M. Nas, The Indonesian Gity; Studies in Urban Development and Planning (Dordrecht. Netherlands: Foris Publications, 1986), pp. 37-55. On the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Anthony D. King, Urbanism. Colonialism, ar\d the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Formations of the World Urban System
(London, 1990), pp. 41-42; King, "Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change," in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 7-32; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colo-
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nialLucknow. 1857-1877 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 27-144; MarkCrinson, Empire Building; Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London, 1996; Miriam Dossal, "Limits of Colonial Urban Planning: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Bombay," /ntemationai Journal of Urban and Regional Research 13 (1989): 19-31; Dane Kennedy, Magic Mountains; Hill Stations and the British Ra; (Berkeley, 1996); Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urhan Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur, 1996); Donald B. Freeman, "Hill Stations or Horticulture ? Conflicting Imperial Visions of the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia" Journal o/HistoricalCeografihy 25 (1999): 17-35; Anthony D. King, Colonial Urhan Development: Culture, Social Pouier, and Environment (London, 1976), pp. 180-276. Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat; Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, 1980); Gwendolyn Wright, "Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930," in Terxsions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 322-45; Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urhanism (Chicago, 1991); Paul Rabinow, French-Modem; Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 211-50; X. Cuilliaume, "Saigon, or the Failure of an Ambition (1858-1945)," in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 181-93; Raymond F. Betts, "Dakar, Ville Imperiale (1857-1960)," in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 193-206; Betts, "The Establishment of the Medina in Dakar, Senegal, 1914," Africa 41 (1971): 143-52; Elikia M'Bokolo, "Peste et Soci^t^ Urbaine & Dakar," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 85-86 (1982): 13-46; J.S. La Fontaine, City Politics; A Study ofLeopoldville, 1962-63 (Cambridge, UK, 1970), pp. 3-27; J. L. Miege, "Algiers: Colonial Metropolis (1830-1961)," in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 171-80; Douglas L. Wheeler," 'Angola is Whose House?' Early Stirrings of Angolan Nationalism and Protest, 1822-1910," African Historical Studies 2 (1969): 1-22; Colin C. Clarke, Kingston. Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-1962 (Berkeley, 1975);EmaBrodber, A Study of the Yards in the City of Kingston (Mona, Jamaica, 1975); Aggrey Brown, Color. Class, and Politics in}amaica (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979). Sidney Chaloub, Cidade Febril: Cortigos e Epidemias na Corte Imperial (Sao Paulo, 1996); Teresa A. Meade, "Civilijjng" Rio; Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930 (University Park, PA, 1997); Donald H. J Clairmont, Africville: the Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community (Toronto, 1974); Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatoum; Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (Montreal, 1991); Anderson, "The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987): 580-98; Anderson, "Place Narratives and the Origins of Inner Sydney's Aboriginal Settlement, 1972-73," Journal of Historical Ceography 19 (1993): 314-35. 7. Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914 (Johannesburg, 1982) vols. I and II; Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel, Apartheid's Cenesis 1935-1962 (Johannesburg, 1993); Rodney Davenport, "African Townsmen? South African Native (Urban Areas) Legislation Through the Years," African Affairs 68 (1969) DT 1.R6; George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, 1984); Robert H Davies, Capital, State and Labor in South Africa 1900-1960 (Brighton, 1979); Martin Legassick, "British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa, 190114," in Segregation and Apartheid in Tiventieth Century South Africa (London, 1995), ed. William Beinart and Saul Dubow; Bernard M. Magubane, The Making of a Racists State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875-1910 (Trenton, 1996); Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, "Lord Milner and the South African State," in Working Papers in Southern African Studies (Johannesburg, 1981), Philip Bonner, ed., vol II; Maynard Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and the Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony," Journal of African History 18 (1977): 387-410; Swanson, "'The Asiatic
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ical Overview of Black Buffalo, Work, Community, and Protest," in African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo's Post-lrviustrial City, 1940-Present Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., ed. (Buffalo, 1990), pp. 8-47; Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (New Haven, 1940); Spencer R. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, NJ. 1860-1920 (New York, 1993); Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Vicky Dula, "The Black Residential Experience and Community Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati," in Taylor, ed. Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970 (Urbana, 1993), pp. 96-125; Asa E. Martin, Our Negro Population: A Sociological Study of the Negroes of Kansas City, Missouri (Original ed., 1913; by New York, 1969); Delores Nason McBroome, Parallel Communities: African Americans in California's East Bay, 1850-1963 (New York, 1993); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Urbana, 1980); Leroy Craham, Baltimore: the Nineteenth Century Black Capital (New York, 1982); Howard N, Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, ) 8 6 5 1890 (New York, 1978); Howard Beeth and Cary D, Wintz, eds., "Introduction" to Part II: "Slavery and Freedom: Blacks in Nineteenth Century Houston," in Beeth and Wintz, ed. Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History ar\d Culture in Houston (College Station, TX, 1992); St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945), pp. 31-64; Robert Cregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia's Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890-1940 (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 120; 98-104; 147-222; Albert Spear, Blacfc Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 18901920 (Chicago, 1969), pp. 129-146; Cilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1963), pp. 127-49; Kusmer, A Chetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, I870-I930 (Urbana, 1976); James R, Crossman, Land of Hope: Chicago: Black Southerners, and the Creat Migration (Chicago, 1989); Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, I900-I920 (Carden City, N.Y., 1975); Joe William Trotter, ed. The Creat Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, arui Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant to Pittsburgh (New York, 1969); Elizabeth Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865-1900 (New York, 1979); Kevin Boyle, Arc o/Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the J a ^ Age (New York, 2004). 9, Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D . C , 1996); Thomas E Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York, 1965); Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, 1981), p. 49-50; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO, 1993); Reginald Horsman, Race arui Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981); Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modem History (New York, 2000), p, 77; John W, Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, UK, 1982); Arthur de Cobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races (L'Jnegalite des Races Humaines) tr. Adrian Collins ([1853] New York, 1967), pp. 29-33, 90 (Cobineau also argued that European "races" attained supremacy by means of particular intermixtures, though). Herbert Spencer, "The Comparative Psychology of Man," (1876) in Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative (New York, 1910), pp. 351-70; Robert Knox, M.D. Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 14546, 10. Kennedy, Magic Mountains, pp. 19-38, 117-47; Clifton C, Crais, " T h e Vacant Land': The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa," Journal of Social History, 25 (1991): 255-76; DuToit, A,, "No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origin of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology," American Historical
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Review 88 (1983): 920-52; Paul Rich, "Race, Science, and the Legitimation of White Supremacy in South Africa, 1902-1940," International journal of African Historical Studies, 23 (1990): 665-86.; Davenport, "African Townsmen?" 11. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, J 8 J 7-i 914 (New York, 1971); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Cenury America (London, 1990); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Cate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, 1998). 12. John Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination or Negroes a Subordinate Race, and (So-Called) Slavery Its Normal Condition; with an Appendix, Showing the Past and Present Condition of the Countries South ofUs.(2nd ed New York, 1868, reprinted at New York, 1993), pp. 168-70. 13. Henry Woodfin Grady, "The New South," in The New South and Other Essays, ed. Edna Henry Lee Turpin (1904) (New York, 1969), pp. 35-36; Grady, "The South and Her Problems," in same collection, pp. 43-91; and "At The Boston Banquet," (1889), in same volume, pp. 92-123. 14. The following joint biography was pieced together from numerous sources. On Ma.hool, see Wilbur F. Cole, "The Mayors of Baltimore: J. Barry Mahool," in Baltimore Municipal Journal Aug. 27,1919, pp. 2-3. On Dashiell, see Distinguished Men of Baltimore and o/Maryland (Baltimore, 1914), p. 66. Biographical information is scarce on West. See Baltimore Sun Dec 20 1910 p.7; his plantation roots are suggested in a letter to Mayor Preston from August 7, 1913 in Baltimore City Archives, Preston Files, #21-d. On Edgar Allen Poe, see History of Maryland from its Founding as a Town to the Current Year, 17291890 (n. pi.: S.B. Nelson, 1898), pp. 691-92; and Sun Dec. 18, 1910, p.7. On William Luke Marbury, Sr., see William Luke Marbury Jr., In the Catbird Seat (Baltimore, 1988), chapters 2 , 3 , 5. On the relationship of Marbury and Bruce, see William Cabell Bruce, Selections from the Speeches, Addresses and Political Writings ofWm. Cabell Bruce (Baltimore, 1927), p. 60. On Grasty, see Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, and H.L. Mencken, and Hamilton Owens, The Sunpapers o/Baltimore (New York, 1937), pp. 285-339; Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837-1987 (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 125-63; Daniel W. Pfaff, "Charles H. Grasty," in American Newspaper Journalists, 1901-1925 (Detroit, 1984), ed. Perry J. Ashley, pp. 93-97. 15. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 52-75; illustration facing p. 208. 16. Marbury, Jr., CatfeirdSeat, pp. 51,321. For two examples of Sun editorials, see "Peace and Good-Will Between the Races," July 10, 1910, p. 6; and "Duty of the United States in Respect to Nicaragua," July 13, 1910, p. 6. 17. Letter from Edgar Allen Poe to Mayor J. Barry Mahool, December 17, 1910, BCA Mahool Files, 451. Also in Sun Dec 18, 1910, p. 7. 18. In an address to an elite Baltimore boys' school in the all-white Baltimore suburb of Roland Park, Bruce remembered with fondness the days of his youth on his father's plantation when he played rollicking games with black boys his age without any sense of antagonism, and when blacks knew their place so well it was even comforting that when "you met a person on one of its roads, the chances were as about 500 to 25 that it was a person of African descent." Bruce, "Address to the Boys of the Gilman Country School,
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Baltimore, Md., May 19,1912," in Bruce, Selectior\s. p. 86. In his later years, he retired to a "venerable home" in rural Ruxton, Maryland. Marbury remained a city dweller, though his family took vacations on his family's estate in Southern Maryland. He also served on the board of a Farm for the Colored Insane nearby on another old plantation where "part of the cure" for the racial and mental condition of the unfortunate inmates consisted in the facility's "favorable climate" and the "proper occupation" it offered them, picking and weaving basket palms. Baltimore Sun, Dec 11, 1910, p. 6. 19. For an example, see Boger, "Shifting Ground," p. 20. 20. William Cabell Baice, The Negro Problem (Baltimore, 1891), pp. 4, 13-14, 20, 31. 21. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill, 2001), pp. 254-56; David Skillen Bogen, "Predecessors of Rosa Parks: Maryland Transportation Cases Between the Civil War and the Beginning of World War I," University of Maryland School of Law, Legal Studies Research Papers No. 200416; from Social Science Research Network Electronic Papers Collection, http//ssm.com/ abstract=570082: 17-22; "Will Oppose 'Jim Crow' Cars," A/ro-American Ledger, April 4, 1914, p. 1. 22. All of the most prominent white supporters of the West Ordinance were associated with reform wing of the Democratic Party. Marbury had made his local reputation in his twenties by giving a speech against the machine in front of a decidedly hostile crowd. Grasty had authorized damning exposes of the machine as editor of the Baltimore News, and Marbury later successfully defended Grasty in a defamation suit resulting from his muckraking. A stint as State Attorney General followed for Marbury, and it was soon after that that he was being bruited as a candidate for U.S. Senate. Then he cast his lot with Maryland's ill-fated disfranchisement campaigns. At the University of Maryland, Marbury and Bruce had been taught by John Prentiss Poe, father of Edgar Allen Poe, the city solicitor. Bruce later wrote a laudatory address about Poe including him among "Seven Great Maryland Lawyers," though there must have been some tension when Poe drafted the state's first disfranchisement amendment, which included the language that would have cut into reformers' support. Marbury later helped write the second of Maryland's proposed disfranchisement bills, the Strauss Amendment, which he designed to shore up reformers' political standing. Grasty's News dutifully printed Marbury's arguments for the measure in 1908. By the time of the West Ordinance, though, all of these campaigns had come to naught, though in court, Marbury continued to defend a disfranchisement bill passed by the city of Annapolis. Marbury's arguments for the Strauss amendment are in the Baltimore News, February 12, 1908, p. 12. Later, as editor of the Sun, Grasty published Marbury's argument in the Annapolis disfranchisement case in which he used John Prentiss Poe's contention that the Fifteenth Amendment was invalid because of the way it was ratified without the approval of Southern states. Sun, October 12, 1910, p. 5. 23. Addresses for Mahool, Preston, Grasty, and Bruce from Folk's Balrimore, City Directory (Richmond, 1909). On Grasty's role in Roland Park, see below. Also, James F. Waesche, Crowning the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland District (Baltimore, 1987,) p. 54; and Roberta Mouldry, "Gardens, Houses, and People: The Planning of Roland Park, Baltimore" (Master Thesis, Cornell University, 1990), p. 281. 24. Sherry L. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of An American City (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 270-78; Garrett Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," pp. 18-19. On the designation
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"favored fan" for the Northwest Side see James F. Waesche, Crotming the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland District (Baltimore, 1987), p. 26. 25. "Negro Invasion Opposed," Baltimore Sun July 6, 1910 p.7; The Sun ran front-page coverage of the Johnson-Jeffries fight on July 5, and had numerous articles about Mahool's efforts to stop the newsreels during the month. Biographical information on Hawkins from NAACP Branch Files, Baltimore Md, 1914-1930, microfilm slide 00855. 26. Grace Elizaheth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890-1940 (New York, 1998), pp. 121-99. John Cell also makes an argument ahout the urban origins of Jim Crow in The Highest Stage of White Supremacy. 11. "The West Ordinance," Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6. On complaints about working-class white rioting, see Sun, Dec 18, 1910, p. 7; Sun April 7, 1911; resolution of North Baltimore Improvement Association in favor of a new segregation law to avoid "racial conflicts replete with disorder," BCA, Preston Files 21-D Apr 26, 1913; The mayor of Roanoke, Virginia perceived a similar dynamic in his city. "The negroes show a disposition to encroach upon white sections continually, and while the best class of whites are powerless, as they seem to think, there is another class which takes the law into their own hands and run undesirable people out of their section." BCA, Mahool Files 404, Dec. 17 1910. 28. Preston Files 21'D June 3, 1918. 29. When it got out that McMechen had moved in to the neighborhood in celebration of his admission to the state bar, the Sun ridiculed this overreaching as behavior typical of 'uppity negroes.' Dashiell appears to have taken on the Ordinance project largely for professional reasonsas Gretchen Boger has shown, he was a renter in the neighborhood, so he did not have real estate interests at risk. Later he wrote a letter imploring Mayor Mahool to let him have the pen used to sign the Ordinance as a talisman of professional success (in the event, Mahool used two pens, so he could give one to West as well). Hawkins later snorted that Dashiell, who did not have formal training like himself, was a "lawyer without brief" in an article in the NAACP's Crisis, noting that the courts had quickly dismissed his version of the law on obvious technical grounds, requiring the intervention of the more experienced William Marbury. As if in response, the Sun offered this backhanded swipe at the NAACP and its officers: "The best and most respectable members of the colored race have no desire to leave their own people and mingle with white people. It is only the aggressive ones who are ever on the lookout for trouble, who wish to obtrude where they are not welcome." "The West Ordinance," editorial in the Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1911, p. 6. Hawkins, "Year of Segregation," p. 28. The Sun by contrast did everything it could to enhance Dashiell and West's reputation, fussing at length over their legislative victory and noting that each claimed trophies from the exploits: Dashiell got the pen Mahool used to sign the Ordinance, and West got a framed copy of the law. Letter from Edgar Allen Poe to Mayor J. Barry Mahool, December 17, 1910, BCA Mahool Files, 451. p. 2. Sun, Dec 18, 1910, p. 7. Marbury probably had the greatest professional stake in his residence in the neighborhood. His home at 159 West Lanvale Street, a few blocks east of McMechen's new house, was known as one of the larger houses in the community. Because it was located nearer to the center of town than other elite neighborhoods it had become a kind of nerve-center of progressive Democratic politicsthe editorial page editor of the Sun was also a regular visitorand was almost certainly a meeting place for the leaders of the campaign to pass the West Ordinance. Looking back many years later Marbury's son writes of the place with enormous nostalgia, as a meeting place for his entire extended clan and all the children of
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the neighborhood as well as city politicos. Race conflict thus threatened the very bosom of a deeply nurtured sense of home as a professional asset. For years after the failure of the West Ordinance, the elder Marbury remained in the neighborhood, even sending his son through the streets to his neighbors' houses to get them to put restrictive covenants in their housing deeds barring them from selling to negroes. Marbury, Jr., Catbird Seat, pp. 29-37; 321. Polk's Baltimore City Directory for 1929 lists Marbury at the same West Lanvale Street address. 30. "Against Negro School," Sun, Oct. 13, 1910, p. 14. 31. The fight and ensuing riots were covered on the front page of the Sun, July 5, 1910, and Mahool's action to stop showing the films was reported on July 6, 1910, p. 6. On July 8, 1910, p. 6 the paper reassured whites in its editorial page that blacks have accompished nothing without tutelage of whites, so black preachers should not gloat over the victory. It cited Charles Frances Adams on his trip to Africa. The paper also printed a dispatch from Britain warning Americans to "keep check on blacks is necessary" after the fight, on July 7, 1910, p. 7, and a note that thefightfilmshad also been suppressed in London (July 13, p. 13). 32. Petitions from Harlem Improvement Association, June 5, 1913, and from North Baltimore Improvement Association, May 17th, 1913; letter from C. E. Stonebraker (full name Cora E. Stonebraker listed in Polk's Baltimore 1909 as the owner of Howard Novelty Co.) to Mayor Preston, May 12, 1913, all documents in Preston Files 21-D. 33. Letter from "R." to Sun, May 15, 1918; and letter from Alice J. Reilley to Mayor Preston, July 21, 1918, Preston Files, 106. 34. Quote is from the title of an editorial "The Segregation Ordinance Should Bring Peace," in the Sun, September 27, 1913, p. 8. For more on this sentiment, see "The West Ordinance" Sun, October 10,1910, p. 6; "Strong for West Plan," Sun, October 11, 1910, p. 16; "The West Ordinance Constitutional" Sun December 20, 1910, p. 6; and "Segregation in Force," same date, p. 7, "The West Ordinance," Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6. Edgar Allen Poe's analysis of the ordinance is dated December 17, 1910, in Mahool Files, 451. 35. On the origins of these ideas in late-eighteenth century London see Robert Fishman,
Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), pp. 51-72. Racialized
language was even used in campaigns for urban reform in mid to late nineteenth-century London, as when the poorer East End was compared to "darkest Africa." See Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Societal in European arui American Thought (New York, 1985), pp. 109-110; Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), pp. 60, 111, 325-26. On a similar theme, the "theory of urban degeneration," see Carth Steadman-Jones, Outcast
Lomion: A Study in the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian Society (London, 1971),
pp. 127-51. On the earliest use of racial segregation to solve urban problems in India, see Nightingale, "Urban and Global Dynamics of Color Lines;" P.J. Marshall, "British Society in India under the East India Company," Mociem Asian Studies 31 (1997): 89-108; and "The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company," Modem AiSian Studies 34 (2000): 307-31. In her excellent "Colonial Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India, 1760-1830" (Ph.D Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000), Durba Ghosh argues that sentiments against unions between British upper class men and Indian women, as well as their children had soured well before Cornwallis.
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36, See for example, Sherry H, Olsen, Baltimore; The Buildingofan American City (Baltimore, 1997), pp, 269-79; Garret Power, "Apartheid Baltimore-Style," pp, 292-97, 301303; Samuel Roberts, "Contagious Fear," p, 307 and chapter 8 as a whole, 37, Sun, Sept 27, 1913, p, 8, 38, The literature on the medical profession and its fight against urban disease is vast. Here are some works 1 have relied on, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793-1905 (London, 1980); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1994); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race ar\d Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2000); Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Angb-Indian Preventative Medicine J859-J9I4 (Cambridge, UK, 1994); Warwick Anderson, "Excremental Colonialism, Public Health, and the Politics of Polution," Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 640-69; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Houndmills, UK, 2004); Vijay Prashad, "Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the Morbid Resolutions of Modernity," Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994): 243-60; Peter Baldwin, Contagion arxd the State in Europe, J 830-1930 (Cambridge, UK, 1999); Charles Rosenburg, Explaining Epidemics, And Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge, UK, 1994); Reynaldo IUeto, "Cholera and the Origins of American Sanitary Order in the Philippines," in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente Rafael (Philadelphia, 1995), pp, 51-82. 39, The use of health arguments to segregate colonial cities is discussed in King, Colonial Urban Development, pp. 180-276; Oldenburg, Cobnial Lucknow, pp, 27-144; Kennedy, Magic Mountains; Yeoh, Contesting Space; Maynard Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome"; Swanson, " 'The Asiatic Menace'"; Pamell, "Sanitation, Segregation, and the Native (Urban Areas) Act"; Harriet Deacon, "Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse"; Frenkel and Western, "Pretext or Prophylaxis?"; Cale, "Segregation in British West Africa"; Curtin, "Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning"; John W, Cell, "Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation," 307-35; Abu-Lughod, Ratat; Gwendolyn Wright, "Tradition in the Service of Modernity; Wright, Politics of Design; Betts, "The Establishment of the Medina in Dakar"; M'Bokolo, "Peste et Soci^t^ Urbaine & Dakar"; Sidney Chaloub, Cidade Febril; Teresa A. Meade, "Civilizing" Rio; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides,- Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatowm (Berkeley, 2001); Samuel Roberts, "Infectious Fear: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and the Logic of Race and Illness in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880-1930" (Ph,D Dissertation: Princeton University, 2002); David McBride, From Tuberculosis to AIDS: Epidemics Among Urban Blacks Since 1900 (Albany, 1991); Vanessa Gamble, Germs Have No Color Line; Blacks and American Medicine, 1900-1940 (New York, 1989); William Deverell, "Plague in Los Angeles: Ethnicity and Typicality," in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed, Valerie Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley, 1999), p, 172-200. On South Africa, see Gary Baines, "The Origins of Urban Segregation"; Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome"; Swanson, " 'The Asiatic Menace'; Deacon, "Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse; Bickford-Smith, Victorian Cape Town. On Johannesburg, see Parnell, "Johannesburg Slums"; and Pamell, "Sanitation, Segregation and the Native (Urban Areas) Act." 40, Shah, Conta^ous Divides pp, 71-73. 41, See E,W. Gilliam, The African in the United States" (1883), Popular Science Monthly 22 (February, 1883): 438-40; and Gilliam, "The African Problem," North American Review 139 (1884): 417-44; Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American
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Negro New York, 1896), 314,328; William Lee Howard, "The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization," Medicine 9 (1903): 423-26. 42. Herman M. Biggs, address in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress of Baltimore, MD (Baltimore, 1911), p. 1; Roberts, "Infectious Fear," pp. 278-79; quote from Jones, p. 301. 43. See, for example, BCA, Preston Files 21-d, letter from Rev WJ. MacMillan, January 18, 1916, and letter from Alice Reilly, July 2, 1918. 44. Marbury Jr., CathirdSeat, pp. 32-33; Roberts, "Infectious Fear," pp. 235-36; 253-56; Mayor Preston himself articulated these concerns in an article "What Can Be Done to Improve the Living Conditions of Baltimore's Negro Population?" Baltimore Municipal Journal, March 16, 1917, p. 1. 45. H.L. Mencken, The Free Lance (unpublished collection of essays from 1911-1915 in Mencken Room, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore), p. 137. Quoted in Garret Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," p. 307. 46. See Janet Kemp, Housing Conditioas in Baltimore (Baltimore, 1907), pp. 18-19; William W. Emmart, "City Plan, " in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress of Baltimore, Md. (Baltimore, 1911), pp. 134-35; William Welch "Sanitation in Relation to the Poor" (1892), in Papers and Addresses by William Henry Welch ed. Walter C. Burkett (Baltimore, 1920), pp. 594-98. 47. On American courts' obstacles to the importation of European slum-clearance and public housing schemes see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 201-208. 48. William M. Emmart, "City Plan," p. 129. Most historians of the Congress agree that the segregation ordinance was not discussed there. This passage is the closest anyone made direct reference to the law and to Northwest Side residents' concerns with declining property values. Emmart's home address in 1909 was 817 N. Fremont Ave., more or less right on the racial frontier {Polk's Baltimore City Directory, 1909). The scheme would have also probably involved some "excess condemnation" of properties adjacent to the proposed avenues in order to give the City land which could be resold at increased price after the projects' completion and could help in its financing. American courts tended to disallow this sort of planning device too. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings pp 201-208. 49. "Ordinance Should Bring Peace," Sun, Sept. 27, 1913, p. 8. 50. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 461-68; 473-79. 51. "Segregation Opposed: Socialists Plead for the Negro," Baltimore Sun, October 4, 1910. At the time of the Ordinance "congestion" had become the key enemy for housing reformers across the country. Yet there is no evidence that Baltimore's white housing reformers responded to testimony given by several African Americans at a public hearing held by the City Council's Committee on Police and Jail that the Segregation Ordinance would increase congestion in black areas. Afro American Ledger, October 29, 1910, p. 4. 52. Addresses at City-Wide Congress, pp. 3-8. 53. Letter from Reverend William J. MacMillan to Mayor Preston, Jan. 18, 1916, PF 106.
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54, Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), pp, 51-72, Quote from Lees, Cities Perceived, pp, 109-110; Briggs, Victorian Cities, pp, 60, 111,325-26, On a similar theme, the "theory of urban degeneration," see SteadmanJones, Outcast London, pp, 127-51, 55, Nield, "Growth of a Colonial City," pp. 309-36; Robert Archer, "Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700-1850 and the Spaces of Modernity," in Visions of Suburbia ed, Roger Silverstone, (London, 1973) pp, 26-54; Swati Chattopadhyay, "Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of'White Town' in Colonial Calcutta," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 160, 56, James F, Waesche, Crouming the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland District (Baltimore, 1987), p, 26. On Brooklyn Heights and Cambridge, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1985), pp. 20-31, As late as the 1910s, the Sun declared that in Baltimore's Mount Vernon Place neighborhood, not far from the Northwest Side the high housing values alone protected the neighborhood from black infiltration. Sun April 7,1911, p. 6. This was not, apparently the feeling of the developers of Roland Park, which was further out and more expensive, but who nevertheless added restrictive covenants against selling property to blacks to newer developments around this time. 57, Racial ideologies and cultural chauvinism amplified the class and gender segregation that underlay middle-class English people's desire to live on urban fringes in India, Houses in white town were worth much more than in black town, even when the grand palaces of the wealthiest Indians were compared with those of their closest British counterparts. Early nineteenth-century advertisements for houses in White Town often touted their location near the residences of prominent Englishmen, Chattopadhyay, "Blurring Boundaries," pp, 159-60 and 178, note 30. According to Pradip Sinha, some Englishmen were puzzled that wealthy Indians in Calcutta's black town seemed to see it as a sign of prestige if their palaces were surrounded by teeming, thatch-roofed bustees (slums) inhabited by poor servants, clients, and political faction followersthose in charge of sanitation and fire safety were especially dismayed. Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History, p, 28, notes 49 and 50, The novelist Sara Jeanette Duncan wryly but realistically narrates the story of a modest British couple in search of a house in Calcutta in The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib ([1893] Ottawa, 1986), She notes that the Brownes were "lucky" in that they found "a house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had survived for several years," She also later notes that the house was across the street from a bustee, whose "proximity does not enhance rents" (pp. 54, 162), But, no matter how much Englishmen may have insisted upon racial segregation. Englishmen themselves lived surrounded by armies of Indian servantseven modest households in Calcutta could have over a hundred. Residential separation in colonial India was more permeable than anywhere else, and as Duncan suggests, bustees housing these domestic retinues often grew up in White Town too, despite repeated demolition efforts. Also, Indians who could and often did buy property in white area often did so because they were comfortable with Europeans' own violations of caste traditions and were eager to adopt Western ways. Given their wealth, they would also most likely raise surrounding property values, Veena Oldenburg, Colonial Lucknow, p. 176, In Hill Stations, as Pamela Kanwar has shown, the situation was somewhat different, as the need for Indian servants and builders swelled the Indian population and as Indian Princes sought to acquire luxury properties in the booming real estate markets of places like Simla, Kanwar, "The Changing Profile of the Summer Capital of British India: Simla 1864-1947," Modem Asian Studies, 18 (1984): pp, 228-36,
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58. Kanwar, "Changing Profile," p.225. On West Africa, see Curtin, "Medical Knowledge," pp. 600-605. 59. Susan Parnell, "Sanitation, Segregation, and the Natives (Urban Areas Act)," p. 272. Black property owners continued to press their claims in such famous "freehold" townships as Sophiatown into the 1950s, when the apartheid regime ended them entirely. Suburban developers in Johannesburg and elsewhere apparently used restrictive covenants as early as the 1890s, and they were virtually universal after 1912. We know little about the ideologies employed in pushing these covenants, but presumably concerns about property values were critical. See Keith S. O. Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria, 2004), pp. 103, 128-33; Lemon, ed.. Homes Apart, pp. 3, 46, 78, 92, 176-77, 181; Christopher, "Spatial Variations." 60. Quotes from "Negro Invasion Opposed" Sun July 6, 1910, p. 7; and "The West Ordinance" editorial in the Sun, October 10, 1910, p. 6. For other references to property values see Property see Sun Oct. 4, 1910; PF 21-d June 12 1913, June 14; PF 21 d Aug 14th; PF21-d Jan 18 1916. 61. "Strong for West Plan," Sun, Oct 11, 1910, p. 16. 62. Letters to the Sun, October 2, 1910, p. 6, and October 7, 1910, p. 6. 63. Editorial in Sun, May 15, 1911, p. 6. 64. Letters to Mayor Preston from Charles M. Childs, 1142 Myrtle Ave., Jan. 24, 1918, PF 106; and from Mrs. A J ReiUy, 1008 Lafayette Ave., June 16, 1913, PF 21-D. 65. This sample is somewhat unscientific but I believe it is useful nonetheless. It was derived from everyone who I could find who were reported by the Sun and the News as speaking out publically in favor of the Ordinance, all signers of petitions and officers of Neighborhood Organizations behind those petitions, and all writers of letters pertaining to the Ordinance to the offices of Mayors Mahool and Preston during their full terms, dating from 1910 to 1918.1 did not include the large numbers of Lafayette Street residents who petitioned Mayor Preston on June 3, 1918 (PF 106) to have the black residents of a house nearby removed because of alleged pistol shots that came from the house, though many of the names appear elsewhere in petitions clearly focused on the Ordinance itself. Of eighty names, the names or professions of 12 were not listed in the Polk's Baltimore City Directory in 1909. Fourteen were attorneys; 11 were secretaries or clerks; 10 were medium-sized business owners; 5 were shop owners; 6 were physicians; 2 were pastors or priests; and 10 were in a miscellaneous category. There were 8 women in the group, some of whom are included among those owning shops or boarding houses, but most of whom were not listed in the directory. Only two of the eighty were real estate agents. 66. The arguments are based on the home street addresses listed in Polk's Baltimore City Directory, 1909 of all the Offices and Executive Committee members of the City WideCongress, as listed in the Addresses Delivered at the City Wide Congress. The professions also listed in the directory attest to the fact that thesefiguresincluded some of Baltimore's most important industrialists, downtown businessmen, and they of course included both politicalfigureslike William Cabell Bruce and world-renowned academics like William Welch. 67. Letter from Reverend William McMillan to Mayor Preston, January 18,1916, in PF 106
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68. Letter from Harry T. Giesendaffer, Real Estate Broker, to Mayor Mahool, Dec. 10, 1910, BCA, Mahool Files, 451, p. 2. See also letters from Charles Otto, John M. Hering, Franklin F. Johnson, J.I. Coldstein, and the Realty Securities Corporation in the same file. 69. On Roland Park, see Roberta Mouldry, "Gardens, Houses, and People." Grasty's role is described in Daniel W. Pfaff, "Charles H. Grasty," in American Newspaper Journalists 1901-25, ed. Perry J. Ashley (Detroit, 1984), p. 93. The exchange between Preston, his Chicago friend, A.K. Warner, and the Real Estate Board of Baltimore can be found in PF 106. 70. Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," 312-13. 71. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 153, 173. 72. The phrase "average opinion about what the average opinion will be" is John Maynard Keynes's, describing the "herd" mentality of unregulated speculative currency markets. 73. Carl Nightingale, "A Tale of Three Global Ghettos," Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 243-57; Brahim Chanchabi, with Catherine de Withol de Wenden, Cite's et Diversitis: L'lmmigration en Europe (Paris, 1995); Peter Hall, "The Inner City Worldwide,"
in The Inner City in Context: The Final Report of the Social Sciences Research Council Inner
Cities Working Part> ed. Peter Hall (London, 1981); John Rex, The Ghetto and Underclass: Essays on Race and Social Policy (Aldershot, UK, 1988); Susan J. Smith, "Residential Segregation and the Politics of Racialization, " in Racism, the City and the State ed. Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (London, 1993), pp. 128-43; Loic J.D. Wacquant, "The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications," Acta Sodologica 39 (1996): 122-39; Wacquant, "Banlieues Franf aises et le Ghetto Noir Americain: de l'Amalgame ei la Comparaison," French Politics and Society, 10 no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 8 1 103; Wacquant, "Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17 no. 3 (1993): 366-83; Wacquant, "The Comparative Structure and Experience of Urban Exclusion: 'Race,' Class, and Space in Chicago and Paris," in Poverty, Inequalit)i, ar\d
the Future of Social Policy: Western States and the New World Order ed. Katherine Mc-
Fate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson (New York, 1995), pp. 543-70; Adil Jazouli, Les Anne'es Banlieues (Paris, 1992), pp. 17-63; Herve Vieillard-Baron, Les Banlieues Franfaises; ou le Chetto Impossible (n.p.,: Editions de l'Aube, 1994); Francois Dubet and Didier Lapeyronnie, Les Qtiartiers d'Exil (Paris, 1992); Sophie Body-Gendrot, "Migration and the Racialization of the Postmodern City in France," in Cross and Keith, Racism, the City and the State, pp. 77-92; Enzo Mingione, "Urban Poverty in the Advanced Industrial World: Concepts, Analysis and Debates," in Urban Poverty and the Ur\derclass: A Reader ed. Mingione, pp. 3-40; Nick Buck, "Social and Economic Change in Contemporary Britain: the Emergence of an Urban Underclass?" in Mingione Urban Poverty, pp. 27798; Hartmut Hausserman, Andreas Kappha, and Rainer Muenz, "Berlin: Immigration, Social Problems, Political Approaches," unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Hartmut Haussermann, "Social Transformation of Urban Space in Berlin Since 1960," unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Jens S. Dangschat and David Fasenfest, "(Re)Structuring Urban Poverty: The Impact of Globalization on its Extent and Concentration," unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Christian Kesteloot, "La
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Probl^matique de l'lnt^gration des Jeunes Urbains: Une Analyse Gfiographique du Cas Bruxellois," unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Sophie Watson, "Work and Leisure in Tomorrow's Cities," in Beyond the Market: Alternatives to Economic Rationalism, eds. Stuart Rees, Gordon Rodley and Frank Stilwell (Sydney, pp. 11-12; see also Mark Peel, "The Urban Debate: From 'Los Angeles' to the Urban Village," in Australian Cities:
Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia ed. Patrick Troy (Hong Kong, 1995), pp.
39-40.
Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York
CARL H. NIGHTINGALE
Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on November 19, 2012
BY THE 1710S, BRITISH AUTHORITIES AT BOTH MADRAS, INDIA, and New York City had made, by ts and starts, more than a half-century of progress in their efforts to increase their power over people they categorized as black. Yet the residential color lines they drew in these two cities contrasted sharply. In Madras, known today as Chennai, stout stone walls separated a privileged European neighborhood from the citys Asian districts. Similar arrangements existed in other colonial cities in the Eastern Hemisphere, but Madras was the rst place in world history to ofcially designate its two sections by color: White Town and Black Town. In New York, by contrast, a small part of town outside the city wall sometimes called the negro lands was dismantled, along with the wall itself. In a pattern that New Yorkers would scarcely recognize today, but which was common among slave-importing cities of the Atlantic world, authorities forced black slaves to live inside the households of whites, especially the wealthiest ones. There, the politics of domestic life settled further questions of color and space. What can we learn from juxtaposing these tales of two cities on opposite sides of the world? Read together, they tell us much about the ties between ventures of European expansion in the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and about the cities that anchored many of those ventures. They also allow us to explore the intellectual, political, and institutional emergence of color lines not only in their commonly assumed Atlantic birthplace, but also in the Indian Ocean, where much less is known about their earlier years.1 Around the turn of the eighteenth century, some European colonial ofcials in both hemispheres reassessed the categories of human difference they deemed most useful to their political projects, and turned increasingly to color
The author wishes to express his deep gratitude to Peter J. Marshall, Eugene F. Irschick, Durba Ghosh, Leonard Blusse, Remco Raben, Aims McGuinness, Robert O. Self, Peter Silver, Daniel T. Rodgers, Pradip Sinha, Eric Seeman, Martha T. McCluskey, and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR for their help in encouraging and sharpening this essay.
1 Perhaps more than any other set of ideas, race was Atlantic, writes Joyce Chaplin, and by their collective choice of research topics and approaches, historians have made this statement so. Chaplin, Race, in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 15001800 (London, 2002), 154. While the academic debate on the role of race in the origins of Atlantic slavery is enormous and so well-known as to make its citation unnecessary here, historians have done little, for example, to explore the role of concepts of difference in the making of the early modern British Empire in Asia even though race and civilization are key aspects of work on the empire from the late eighteenth century on.
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concepts such as black and white, even if they still showed little interest in the idea of race. The inspiration for telling the stories of Madras and New York alongside each other comes from historians who approach comparative topics by highlighting connections between different parts of the world, and more specically by calls to reframe the Atlantic world in larger contexts.2 But such transnational and trans-hemispheric perspectives also help us scrutinize the real extent of larger connective changes. Were keywords, ideas, politics, and institutions of colony-building actually exported successfully from one part of the world to another, or did barriers operating within overlapping hemispheric, oceanic, continental, imperial, regional, urban, neighborhood, or even smaller geographies prevent or alter such long-distance trade? Such an approach treats colonial cities as continually changing participants in larger-scale historical transformationsnot subject to time-freezing typologies, as they often are. Certainly, no single geographic structure marked the colonial city, as some scholars of Asian and African urban segregation have argued.3 Instead, colonial urban authorities sought to restrict the movement and residence of their subjects using changing ranges of policies that involved both large-scale neighborhood division and forced co-residence. Explaining the policy mixes and priorities in any given colonial city at any time requires us to highlight the contingencies of political dramas that unfolded on various geographic scales. As in all early modern colonial cities, ofcials in both Madras (founded in 1639 1640) and New York (founded as New Amsterdam in 1624 1626) were forced to continuously engage in diplomacy and war with local governments and rival European imperial enterprises. They also simultaneously contended with restive, polyglot local populations, who often violently resisted colonial rule and used urban space in transgressive ways. Indeed, spatial politics in Madras and New York took shape overwhelmingly in the context of concerns about urban defense and social control. Of course, quests for prot, commercial monopoly, and control over labor and land undergirded much of the colonial urban enterprise, but in residential matters, even economic concerns were sometimes subordinated to political and geopolitical imperatives. Other questions that became so important to modern urban structure, such as moral improvement and urban sanitation, had much less impact on the residential policies of the two cities during this earlier period.4 At the same time, the politics of urban defense and control in colonial cities was also contingent upon well-known hemispheric differences in the contexts of colonization. In Madras, the focus on residential separation reected a genre of urban
2 Peter A. Coclanis, Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History, Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 169182; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Eric Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 15002000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2007); Alison Games, Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62, no. 4 (2006): 675692; Philip J. Stern, British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections, ibid., 693712; and Peter A. Coclanis, Atlantic World or Atlantic/World? ibid., 725 742. 3 Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London, 1976), 1617, 39 40; King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London, 1990), 3537. 4 On questions of moral reform and segregation in a transnational context, see Carl H. Nightingale, The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation, Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 667702.
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politics that had precedents in early New Spain and Portuguese West Africa and had traveled to the East. There, separation policies became more permanently established in a context in which colonialism was limited to seaborne trade, urban outposts, and often ambiguous power balances between itinerant European agents and local merchants and rulers. In the New World, where large-scale settler and plantation colonialism was possible, interest in large-scale urban separation schemes waned. Instead, colonial authorities in New York and in cities across the Americas prioritized policies of forced co-residence long associated with urban slaveholding. As authorities in Madras and New York mobilized support for their contrasting policies of residential restriction, they drew heavily on contemporary concepts of human difference. In the ofcial records from the two cities, a striking similarity emerges in these otherwise very different places. In both Madras and New York, almost simultaneously at the turn of the eighteenth century, a dichotomous color politics, involving a prioritization of polarized concepts of black and white, began to dominate authorities pronouncements. When these ofcial sources are read through trans-hemispheric lenses, a crisscrossing transoceanic trade in urban political ideas emerges. Residential policies traveled for the most part within separate hemispheres, from one empire to another. By contrast, the black-white dichotomy became a trans-hemispheric phenomenon, traded principally within a single empire, the British one. Still, hemispheric and local contingencies mattered in the invention of urban color politics, for British authorities in West and East dened black and white differently and used it for different purposes. In Madras, the need to appease a particular constellation of foreign Asian merchant communities led to the rst instance in world history of an ofcially designated urban residential color line. In both cities, the challenge of controlling the smallest, the most intimate, and arguably the least governable urban spaces left important imprints on the nature of color politics. To a great degree, then, the worlds color lines and the hurly-burly of urban politics created each other. These contingencies in the historical geography of urban color lines force us to come to terms with lingering universalistic assumptions in historians analysis of concepts of human differencemost notably those associated with the search for the origins of race. A vast consensus has emerged among scholars in many disciplines that color and race categories are continually reinvented within the context of social and political contestation, and that they have no all-embracing meaning outside those contexts. But as is true of many origin narratives, the search for the origins of race or racism (as well as the debate about the role of race in creating slavery) usually begins with universal denitions. For some, any historical use of color categories represents sufcient evidence of the presence of raceand many of us who demur on this point still instinctively refer to black and white as racial concepts. More historians are satised by the idea that race arises once moral and cultural characteristics of groups are seen as inalterably linked to attributes of the physical body, or are seen as heritable and thus linked to sex. Finally, some scholars use the term proto-racial to describe early modern ideas or institutions that do not quite add up to their universal denition of race, but which surely laid the way for
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full-blown racial versions later on, presumably in the modern era of scientic racism.5 The stories of Madras and New York force us to abandon such preset denitions. In the ofcial discourse of both cities, intellectual projects involving black, white, body, heredity, sex, nation, people, color, complexion, casta, and race all had richly contingent histories that were sometimes connected to each other and sometimes separate. The history of black, which authorities in both cities used widely from early on, was separate from that of white, which replaced a preference for the self-designation Christian within the British Empire only much later. As white came into greater usage, other ideas about human difference, involving heredity and sexuality, were more rmly linked to color than they had been beforealthough more so in New York than in Madras. Most striking of all, however, in both cities throughout this period of seminal developments in color politics, authorities never found the word race useful at all, even though it was surely available to them. They overwhelmingly preferred nation, people, and later color and complexion as more general categories for white and blackas well as for other kinds of subcategories of people, including those dened by religious, cultural, and political terms.6 To analyze the urban politics of Madras and New York as racial or protoracial in disguise would be to allow arbitrarily privileged notions of race to obscure the sheer multiplicity of early modern concepts of human difference at play. It would also be to muddy much more interesting questions: why historical actors prioritized some of these concepts over others, developed particular meanings and uses for them, and used them in support of political and institutional projects. Indeed, the most important lesson of the tale of these two cities is about why color categories, not at all connected to a notion of race, were selected and deployed within urban politics to help build key institutions of Western domination: segregation and slavery.
WITHOUT . . . DEFENSIBLE PLACES, WROTE A BRITISH MERCHANT in 1642 from India to the Court of Directors of the British East India Company in London, your goods and Servants among such treacherous people are in Continuall hazard. The just feare
5 Joyce Chaplin, for example, invokes The denitive and insidious feature of racism: its grounding in the human body and in lineage, which thus denes it as inescapable, a nonnegotiable attribute that predicts socio-political power or lack of power. Chaplin, Race, 155. See also Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 921, 157 200; George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 56, 11, 23, 39 40, 41, 75; Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century America (Oxford, 2004), 125140. For analyses that come closer to my argument here, see Nicholas Hudson, From Nation to Race: The Origin of Racial Classication in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247264; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, Pa., 2000). 6 Both David Theo Goldberg, in Racist Culture (Oxford, 1993), 6263, and Audrey Smedley, in Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 36 40, treat race as a synonym of nation and people, but neither mentions that race was used much less often and for more circumscribed purposes, a point made by Hudson in From Nation to Race, 247, 256, 259 nn. 12. Nancy Shoemaker has noted that white emerged in a later period than black (and red even later); A Strange Likeness, 129134.
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whereof hath induced the Portugalls [and] Dutch . . . to frame themselves in more safe habitations.7 Citing the precedent of their rival imperialists, the directors agreed, and once they built their new fortressnamed Fort St. Georgeoutside the little shing village of Madraspatnam, a new divided city grew up, much like the European colonial towns that stretched along the coasts from Morocco to East Asia. In these cities, tropical disease and long distances from the metropole kept European populations smalltiny in British settlements. Surrounding them were vast and generally increasing indigenous populations with long-standing urban traditions of their own. Some of the worlds richest and most powerful governments held swaythe Mughals in India, the Savads in Persia, and the anti-foreign Qing in China and Tokugawa in Japan. Powerful foreign merchant communities from across Asia and East Africa dominated many individual port cities. Slavery thrived in the Indian Ocean world, and European colonial authorities relied on slaves, even to build the walls around their cities.8 But overall, European expansion in the Indian Ocean world was never fundamentally dependent on the slave trade or slave labor; the vast majority of wealth came from transshipping luxuries such as spices, porcelains, and cloth within the Eastern Hemisphere and back to Europe. Dutch, British, and French mercantile companies were chartered to establish as much control over this trade as they could wrest from the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and each other. Under such conditions, Europeans did generally force non-European slaves and servants to live within their households. But the politics of defending and controlling Indian Ocean colonial cities was focused above all on separating the residence of Europeans and largely non-enslaved local Asians or Africans. As the British merchant suggested, the Portuguese had rst shown the way, by building a long chain of urban fortresses called feitorias, beginning with the castle of Elmina in West Africa in 1482. As these forts became the nuclei for towns, the Portuguese experimented with legislation setting aside separate quarters for Europeans and Natives, although not all of their colonial cities took a dual form. When the Spanish founded Manila in 1570, they vigorously enforced a policy of dividing cities that they had originally tried less successfully in the Americas. Authorities set aside a heavily fortied section of the city called Intramuros for Spaniards, and they passed stringent decrees banishing the local Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese populations to several separate neighborhoods outside the walls. In the early seventeenth century, navies of the Dutch East India Company took over many of the Portuguese forts by force and built some new ones of their own. As Remco Raben has shown, their walls were supplemented with the Indian Oceans most sophisticated systems of urban segregation, sometimes involving intricate population registration systems and pass laws, most notably in their capital, Batavia.9
7 Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 16401800: Traced from the East India Companys Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Ofce and from Other Sources, 3 vols. (1913; repr., New York, 1968), 1: 39 40, 217. 8 The trade in slaves to and from Madras was signicant, but exports of slaves from the port were outlawed for a short time in the seventeenth century, and all slave trading was abolished in 1790. Ibid., 1: 127136, 147149, 545546; 2: 81, 135, 451; 3: 382. 9 Some make connections between feitorias and foreign merchant enclaves known as fondaccos in the Mediterranean, which were also related to early modern Jewish ghettos. Unlike these forebears, though, the feitorias were a vehicle of colonial control by foreigners over locals. Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the
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At Madras, East India Company ofcials observed and debated the merits of these precedents and adapted them to meet the local constellation of political threats. Far from being an almighty overlord, the ragtag band of company agents who acquired Madraspatnam in 1639 did so under an arrangement that made the company an only somewhat privileged vassal to a petty local ofcial of the long-crumbling Vijayanagar Empire, the Naik Damarla Venkatappa. Local sovereignty over the region shifted continually and unpredictably over the next seventy-ve years, and company authorities had to fend off several besieging armies as well as spies who mingled among the many Indians and other Asians who settled near the new commercial outpost. The Portuguese occasionally harassed Madras from their nearby town of Sao Thome; the Dutch had a fort a few miles up the coast; and the French would soon threaten from Pondichery just to the south.10 As the town grew around Fort St. George, Europeans appear to have built their houses closest to the fortress walls. By the mid-1650s, they built yet another wall, which formed a much larger trapezoidal perimeter around the whole European settlement, enclosing what was then called Christian Town.11 Meanwhile, it also became clear that the rapidly growing Indian city beyond those walls posed its own security threat because it provided easy cover for enemy armies. For ve decades, authorities at Madras tried to cajole the citys wealthiest Asians into nancing a wall around Black Town as well. In 1687, the East India Companys powerful court director, Josiah Child, even insisted that the Hindu and Muslim merchants of Madras as well as the resident Armenians and Portuguese be encouraged to participate in the local Corporation (municipal government) as aldermen, and in exchange pay a wall tax. Some have traced this type of charter to the Americas, but as Child saw it, his goal was to set up a Dutch Government amongst the English in India. Finally, in 1706, after seven years of periodic sieges from a particularly mercurial local sovereign, the Nawab Daud Khan of the Carnatic and Gingee, Governor Thomas Pitt (grand-uncle of the Great Commoner) used British arms to conne the heads of the castes of Black Town in a local pagoda until they came up with the money. A stone wall nally went up around Black Town in the next few years.12 (See Map 1.)
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003). Although no synthetic treatment exists of Portuguese cities in Africa and Asia, clues can be found in Joao Teixeira Albernaz, Plantas das cidades, portos, e fortalezas da conquista da India oriental, reproduced in Francois Pyrard, Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales (16011611), 2 vols. (Paris, 1998), 1: 417 441. At Goa, the clergy successfully pushed for religious separation decrees, but secular authorities did not enforce them, and the capital city never took on the structure of a divided town. C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 14151825 (Oxford, 1963), 5, 911. On Manila, see Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 3863. On Batavia, see Remco Raben, Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 16001800 (doctoral diss., University of Leiden, 1996), 162247; Leonhard Blusse, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht, 1986), 7396. 10 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 924, 34 38, 43, 6365; 2: 149. 11 Ibid., 1: 204 207. 12 Childs instructions can be found in Government of Madras, Records of Fort St. George: Despatches from England (Madras, 19111971), 61 vols. covering 16701758 [hereafter DfE], vol. 8, June 9, 1686, nos. 16, 27, 29. On the trans-hemispheric trade in colonial charters, see Stern, British Asia and British Atlantic, 701705. For the wall tax debate, see Government of Madras, Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultation Books (Madras, 19101953), 82 vols. [hereafter PC or Public Consultations], vol. 11, January 4, 1686; vol. 19, January 14, 1692; vol. 28, May 10, 1699; vol. 29, December 4, 1700; vol. 31, August 3, 1702; vol. 36, July 6, 1706. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 497 498. On Pitts resolution, see
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MAP 1: Detail from Governor Thomas Pitts map of Madras, ca. 1711. From Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: facing 593.
Indians played important roles in the politics and the divided development of Madras, and not only by threatening the city with armies. In fact, the subcontinents traditional openness to outsiders, which contrasted so markedly with policies in China, Japan, and even Java, made the companys initial deal with the Naik conceivable in the rst place. Indian practices of caste and religious segregation may have also made the dividing of Madras easier. As in other South Indian cities, the rival Right Hand and Left Hand Hindu caste alliances in Madras lived on separate streets in Black Town, as did untouchable Pariars and Muslims. Many Hindu residents of Madras no doubt preferred to live far from what were seen as sacrilegious practices of the British, such as eating beef or hiring Pariars as household servants although mercantile interests just as doubtlessly led many to suspend some such pieties.13 British authorities relationships with Indian merchants at Madras, as elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, were based on delicate push-me pull-you power dynamics. Security needs to keep locals at a distance were contradicted by equal and opposite economic incentives for close interaction. The would-be monopoly required excluPC, vol. 34, October 25, 1705; vol. 35, July 6, July 25, and September 12, 1706; and Cornelius Neale Dalton, The Life of Thomas Pitt (Cambridge, 1915), 214 230. 13 Patrick Roche, Caste and the Merchant Government in Madras, 16391749, Indian Economic and Social History Review 12 (1975): 392393; Arjun Appadurai, Right and Left Hand Castes in South India, Indian Economic and Social History Review 11 (1974): 245257; Joseph J. Brenning, Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel, Modern Asian Studies 11 (1977): 398 404. On the difculties of attracting pious Hindu servants to work in European homes, see Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 617.
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sive access to middlemen, called dubashes at Madras, to make business contacts, help with negotiations, and provide nancing for purchases. At Madras the companys dependence on locals was especially acute, as cloth production required an elaborate cottage-industry infrastructure and thousands of artisans to make it work.14 Still, it would be a mistake to call the double city of Madras a case of voluntary, mutual, or de facto segregation. The walls themselves were, of course, the work of the East India Company itself, and they communicated commanding superiority over Indian subjects. The architecture of the European section radiated might: parapets and cannons festooned the roofs of the walls, gates, and houses. By the eighteenth century, most buildings in White Town were plastered with chunam, a substance made from the crushed shells of a local mollusk, which gave exteriors a marble-like appearance and from out at sea made White Town shine whiterliterallythan Black Town. Proclamations from the company agent and later governor were traditionally issued to the sound of cannon shots from White Town and large processions that passed from the fort through the massive Choultry Gate into Black Town. In support of the walled division of residences, governors felt it necessary to either pass or propose laws in 1680, 1688, 1690, 1698, 1706, 1743, 1745, and 1751 that regulated where various groups could live, sometimes ordering English residents to restrict the resale of their houses to other Englishmen. Because of all these measures, a dual housing market, and even a version of what South African historian Paul Maylam calls scal segregation, developed in Madras by the eighteenth century, if not before. Property values were deemed much higher on average in White Town even taking into account Indian merchants palatial dwellings and temples in Black Townand tax rates for European property were set lower than those levied in Black Town to avoid excessive burdens on Englishmen.15 On top of that, the British company was not above using Indian caste politics for its own ends. For many years, governors relied primarily on members of the higherstatus Right Hand caste alliance as the companys principal dubashes and suppliers. When the British sought better prices by allowing merchants from the Left Hand to bid on contracts, they provoked an enormous battle that centered on ghts over the neighborhoods allotted to each caste. Governor Pitt nally forced caste leaders into seclusion to negotiate a clear division of Black Town, complete with a system of boundary stones, and the British got their cheaper cloth.16
14 Susan Nield, The Dubashes of Madras, Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1984): 131; C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988), 4578; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), 80118, 203220. In the early years, separation was also aimed at controlling the movement of the companys own servants, with an eye to minimizing private trade. Curfews and forced attendance at the governors table for dinner were gradually abandoned by the late 1680s, however. Hiram Bingham, Elihu Yale: The American Nabob of Queen Square (1939; repr., [Hamden, Conn.], 1968), 20. 15 PC, vol. 2, September 1680, 115116; vol. 14, February 27, 1688; vol. 16, July 21, 1690; vol. 26, February 25, 1698; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 25, 308, 395396, 425 426, 573; Paul Maylam, South Africas Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid (Aldershot, 2001), 149. Property values in Madras were ascertained during a survey of 1727. J. Talboys Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 3 vols. (18611862; repr., Delhi, 1990), 3: 110, 21. 16 PC, vol. 38, June 26, July 17, August 20, 22, 25, and 27, September 10, 1316, and 2325, October 1, 6, 2022, and 30, November 7 and 13, and December 2 and 6, 1707; vol. 39, January 1 and 20 and June 10 and 23, 1708. Dalton, The Life of Thomas Pitt, 319334; Appadurai, Right and Left Hand Castes, 245257; Brenning, Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves, 398 404; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 2530.
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MAP 2: Detail from Plan of Fort St. George, Part of the Black Town and Country Adjacent . . . (1758), showing the destruction of the old Black Town and new fortications around White Town. From Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: facing 554.
As in divided cities throughout history, the color lines at Madras were semipermeable, regularly transgressed by Indian servants, mercantile collaborators, and people in search of sex. Separation proclamations tended to arise in moments of crisis and to languish in a less-enforced state during more stable times. But the walls of White Town and the color inequalities they created continuously served as a primary instrument in institutionalizing what became a color hierarchyas well as a grand stage for the theatrics of an emerging colonial authority. In the 1740s, as Britains wars with France and Spain took on trans-hemispheric dimensions, the process of fortied and legalized separation by color intensied dramatically at Madras. In 1746, the French seized the city, leveled the historic Black Town (wall and all), and resettled its inhabitants four hundred yards from the gates of White Town. When the British regained Madras two years later, they forbade any building in the intermediate zone, which became a military cordon sanitaire forcing besieging armies into the open. Then they lled in the languid Elambore (or Cooum) River to the west of White Town, allowing for a doubling of White Towns area and making room for a bristling, state-of-the-art Vauban-style fortication system. (See Map 2.) Later in the eighteenth century, the company subsidized the growth of White Town beyond the walls. Its methods, which evoke those of twentieth-century South Africa and the United States, included grants of land for suburban garden estates, and the construction of wider roads to accommodate the greater number of horse carriages carrying commuters into the citys historic business center.17
17 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 347348, 448 452, 520538, and map facing 554; Susan Nield, Madras: The Growth of a Colonial City in India, 17801840 (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1977), 309336; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), 190218; Susan Parnell, Slums, Segregation, and Poor Whites in Johannesburg, 19201934, in
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IN THE AMERICAS, VERY DIFFERENT epidemiological, demographic, political, and economic circumstances held sway, creating an intra-hemispheric, trans-colonial ow of very different mixtures of urban planning ideas. In contrast to the East, the Atlantic microbial exchange favored the increase of the New Worlds European and African populations and wrought catastrophic decreases in the numbers of Native people, who were also in general far less urbanized than in Asia. Even after the fall of the Mexican and Inka empires, Native American governments and economies could be formidable by world standards, as the governors of New York found in their many dealings with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and the Canadian Indians beyond. But, in part because of population decline, no Native government in the Americas was able to prevent Europeans increasingly dense settlement of coastal hinterlands, the conscation of the continents mineral resources, and, from Maryland to Brazil, the appropriation of vast lands for cash-crop plantations. Native Americans were widely enslaved but were never available in large enough numbers to match the Atlantic plantation systems sheer demand for labor. By well before 1700, the economy of the Western Hemisphere, unlike that of the Indian Ocean, depended overwhelmingly on imports of captive Africans as slave laborers. In some colonial cities of the Americas, residential separation became a feature of European policies toward Amerindians, most notably in New Spain, where in 1563 King Philip himself issued an edict that established separate reducciones or barrios for urban Indians, which were off limits to all Spaniards except friars in charge of Christian conversion, and that forbade Natives from entering the precincts of the [Spanish] town in the interest of defense. In the French and British colonies, similar but much smaller districtscalled praying towns in New Englandwere established, and some frontier towns, including Albany, New York, passed laws restricting seasonal Indian traders to camps outside the walls. In New Amsterdam, Governor Peter Stuyvesant built the citys famous, if imsy, wall in 1658 (destined to give its name to the Wall Street nancial district) to protect the citys landside approach against both Indians and expansion-minded colonists from New England. Laws forbade Indians from tarrying . . . during the night south of the wall.18 Nowhere in the Americas, however, did such separation policies remain central to urban politics for long. In New Spain, local authorities enforced their kings decree lackadaisically, if they were able to at all, in the face of the rapid growth of a Christian mestizo and mulatto population and the declines in Native populations. In North America, European settlement of the hinterlands of coastal towns meant that nearby Native peopleswhose settlements often changed seasonally and were thus unlikely
Robert Morrell, ed., White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 18801940 (Pretoria, 1992), 115129. 18 Quote from the Spanish ordinance from Zelia Nuttal, Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying Out of New Towns, Hispanic American Historical Review 4 (November 1921): 753. Quote from the New Amsterdam ordinance in Berthold Fernow, ed., Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 Anno Domini, 7 vols. (Baltimore, Md., 1976), 2: 5152. See also 1: 22 and 4: 32. Similar prohibitions on overnight stays were instituted by the British, but these applied to strangers of all backgrounds, not just Indians. Herbert L. Osgood, Frederic W. Jackson, Robert H. Kelby, and Hiram Smith, eds., Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 16751776, 8 vols. (New York, 1905), 1: 135, 220, 246. On praying towns, see Yasu Kawashima, Legal Origins of the Indian Reservation in Colonial Massachusetts, American Journal of Legal History 13 (1969): 4256. On Albany, see City of New York, The Colonial Laws of New York, 5 vols. (Albany, 1894), 1: 89, 2: 150.
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in any case to develop into long-standing Indian Townsmoved farther inland, declined due to war and disease, or, as among praying Indians, assimilated into colonial society. Although historians argue that schemes such as the praying towns pregured segregated rural Indian reservations, the spatial politics of port cities such as New York, unlike Madras, were decreasingly affected by the otherwise complex ongoing diplomacy and warfare between Europeans and Native peoples.19 Instead, urban authorities in the Americas became increasingly preoccupied with suppressing what they saw as the nearly constant insubordination of urban black slaves. To such authorities, the idea of creating separate neighborhoods for slaves was seen as nothing less than an open invitation to slave revolution, and possibly the downfall of the whole Atlantic plantation system. Instead, they preferred a technique that went back to ancient times, forcing slaves to live in the households or on the properties of their masters. In practice this amounted to a private, domestically run system of household separation, with slaves living in garrets and closets in the house or in the black houses (cases a negres) sited in back courtyards next to the kitchens ` and stables where many urban slaves worked. To enforce that system, authorities from Mexico City to Charles Town and from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro passed draconian black codes that limited slaves movements and actions and kept any independent social or political life to an absolute minimum, especially between slaves and free blacks. In other words, beyond the masters home, blacks had to be segregated from one another.20 Large-scale residential color separation of Africans was very limited in slaveimporting colonial cities of the Atlantic. In New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company itself owned many slaves and for a short period maintained a guarded compound for them. But for the most part, the segregation of Negroes occurred in deance of the regime of slavery, not in defense of it. Slaves themselves, often with help from free blacks, built black enclavesincluding Charlestons Neck, Savannahs Bluffs, the yards of Kingston, and Rios rst informal hillside settlementsas a means to ensure a small measure of independent life within a brutal system.21 On Manhattan, the disappearance of residential separation for both blacks and Natives went hand in hand with the effort to formalize slavery. New Amsterdam had
19 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 15191810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 147, 370381; R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Mexico City, 16601720 (Madison, Wis., 1994), 1621; Kawashima, Legal Origins of the Indian Reservation, 4256. 20 For a few examples among many on the residence of slaves in cities, see James C. Anderson, Roman Architecture and Society (Baltimore, Md., 1997), 293336; A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 14411555 (Cambridge, 1982), 9699, 120125; Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, 1521; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 18081850 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 5966; Anne Perotin-Dumond, La Ville aux Iles, la Ville dans LIle: Basse Terre et Pointe-a-Pitre, ` Guadeloupe, 16501820 (Paris, 2000), 462 470, 641718; Pedro Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 16801834 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2003), 39 40, 158163; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 18201860 (New York, 1964), 5579. 21 On the Quartier de Swarten de Comp Slaves on Manhattan, see Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 16131863 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 12. Panama is an exception that proves the rule: it was rebuilt as a dual city after being sacked by Henry Morgan in 1671. The light-skinned elite there had less to fear from slaves than from a large free population of color who were not tied to elite households and who became the inhabitants of the Arrabal outside the city walls. Alfredo Castillero Calvo, La Ciudad imaginada: El Casco Viejo de Panama (Pan ama, 1999). Thanks to Professor Aims McGuiness for help in summarizing Castillero Calvos argument.
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no formal slave code. A substantial group of Atlantic creoles who served as bondspeople to the Dutch West India Company were able to petition for a half-free status, and a number owned land in what were called the new negro lots or the negro lands well north of Peter Stuyvesants town wall, in the general area of todays Washington Square. When the British took New York, they agreed to honor this arrangement, but over time they also pushed for expansion north of Wall Street. In the process, unlike their counterparts at Madras, ofcials in New York asserted control over blacks by destroying a wall. Land prices and taxes increased as the city edged northward, ultimately forcing many of the citys blacks to leave Manhattan altogether, ending the faint pattern of residential separation.22 In New York, also in contrast to Madras, it was the local city and provincial authoritiesmany of whom were slaveholders themselves and faced the threat of rebellion most acutelywho took the initiative for ever more draconian strategies of control, often over the objections of the governors sent from Britain. In 1681 1683, 1702, 1706, and 1712, the Common Council of New York City and the New York Assembly formalized slavery in the city and colony in much the same way the Spanish, French, and British West Indians had before. In addition to rules that forced slaves to live in their owners houses and carry notes from their masters when they ventured outside, the 1712 code made manumissions even more difcult and forbade manumitted slaves from owning property. This made it impossible for any free black residential community, separate or otherwise, to grow in New York. Slaves were dispersed in small numbers throughout the white residences of the city. Because the wealthiest New Yorkers owned the largest numbers of slaves, the greatest concentrations of blacks lived in the wealthiest white neighborhoods. Authorities did agree to establish a separate African burial ground, but that only proves the rule about the structure of slave cities: black people were granted a neighborhood of their own only when they were dead.23 Laws such as New Yorks created big obstacles to intimate relationships between blacks, including marriage. Local authorities also tried mightily but less successfully to interpose their agents into other, smaller, troublesome spaces in the urban fabric where slaves could nd transgressive autonomy and connection: workplaces, schools, informal markets, ceremonial grounds, taverns, and at night in the citys labyrinthine back alleys. The economics of urban slaveholding often thwarted these efforts. Although many urban slaves, especially women, were domestic servants whose jobs bound them to their masters households, slaveholders could also make a good prot by hiring slaves out, a practice that gave blacks considerable autonomy to move about, gather, and even establish separate residences. Although the slaveholding elite quarreled among themselves over the dangers of this system, and ordinary white workers bitterly opposed the competition from slaves low-wage labor, pocketbook concerns kept it alive, and new measures to control slaves movements proliferated. Local legislatures forbade more than four, then more than three, slaves from meeting together, strengthened pass laws, outlawed Sunday revelries and the sale of liquor
22 Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 1: 72, 78, 9798, 177; 2: 5152, 209; 5: 104; 6: 382, 385, 392. Hodges, Root and Branch, 34 36; Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 16261863 (Chicago, 2003), 2324. 23 Hodges, Root and Branch, 6368; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 3136; Jill Lepore, The Tightening Vise, in Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York, 2005), 6975.
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to slaves, and set ever more stringent curfews, which ultimately even made it illegal for a slave to walk around after dark without a lantern. As Ira Berlin has argued, these laws, passed and re-passed throughout the Americas, only document the wide extent to which slaves outed them. In New York, slaves continued to mount insurgencies, often allied with radicalized poorer whites, most notably in 1721 and 1732. The biggest conspiracy of all was that of 1741, in the midst of the same bout of brewing pan-imperial warfare that triggered a surge of segregation in Madras. In New York, the result was a rash of gruesome public executions and another series of crackdowns on slaves movements outside their masters households.24
TO SELL THEIR POLICIES OF DEFENSE, CONTROL, AND URBAN RESIDENCE, colonial ofcials drew on rich languages of human difference. The crucial change in these languages at both Madras and New York was the decreasing use of national and religious categories in favor of color categories, rst black and then, considerably later, white. Important increases in British authorities power in both cities were accomplished at the same time that the hybrid Christian-black opposition was replaced by the more thoroughly color-struck politics of white and black. Despite the divide between the institutions of British colonization in the Americas and the East India Company in Asia, the rise of whiteness in both places around the turn of the seventeenth century suggests that the early modern British Empire served as a conduit for color concepts that linked West and East. Still, black and white politics took different forms in the two cities, reecting the contrasting hemispheric contexts and local contingencies that drove residential policies. As Winthrop Jordan and others have shown, the history of blackness in the West reaches back to classical times. The most complex premodern vocabulary of color, however, developed within the Muslim world, and when the Portuguese began exploring, and slaving, on the West Coast of Africa, they adopted the Arab convention of using white (branco) for Arabs and black (negro) for Africans. The Spaniards also used negro for the slaves they imported into New Spain, and that word was absorbed, along with mulatto and mestizo, in various Iberian-inspired forms into Dutch, French, and English throughout the Atlantic, including at New Amsterdam from its earliest years.25 European travel writers used a variety of colors as descriptive terms for Asians white, yellow, brown, and blackbut colonial authorities rarely used these words as ofcial political categories for their subjects. The Dutch, English, and French, for example, never used a variant of the word Negro to describe Asians;
24 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 156157; Hodges, Root and Branch, 4850, 5969; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 33, 39 45; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan (New York, 2005). 25 On Arab color systems, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam (New York, 1971). For examples of early Portuguese use of color terms, see Valentim Fernandes, Description de la cote dAfrique de Ceuta au Senegal, trans. P. De Cenival and Th. Monod (15061507; repr., Paris, 1938), 58, 69; Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire. On early modern British discussions of blackness, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 15501812 (Baltimore, Md., 1968), 3 43. For examples of casta terms in New York slave laws, see The Colonial Laws of New York, 1: 597598, 766, 845, 922.
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in the Indian Ocean, even Africans were most often called Caffres or Kafrs, after the Arabic word for unbeliever. Moreover, although colonial authorities had often divided their towns into zones for Europeans and Asians from the 1480s on, the records reveal no instance where authorities ofcially designated these sections by color before Madrass Black Town in the mid- to late seventeenth century.26 Even at Madras, the choice of a color designation was not automatic. The inhabitants of the city included many people who were usually described as black by travelerssometimes even black as pitch.27 British ofcials at Madras, however, most often used national or religious designations such as Malabar Town (the word for Madrass majority Tamil population) or Gentue Town (a word that referred to either the citys large minority Telugu population or Hindus in general) to designate the Asian section of their outpost. Locals preferred to call Madras, or at least its Asian section, Chennaipattanam (the root of todays Chennai), in honor of the Naik Venkatappas father, and they avoided Black Town in their petitions to the British governors. Only after 1676 did the phrase Black Town enter the vocabulary of British ofcials, and it appears to have been a derogatory term. Some of this disdain may have come from associations between blackness and slaves in the Atlantic, but agendas within the local politics of defense and control were clearly more important. From the citys earliest years, the British saw local inhabitants as treacherous people, and they most often used the word black as a way to express their frustration with Indians refusal to submit to company commands. The phrase Black Town arose in the context of one of many energetic but fruitless efforts to get Indian merchants to pay the wall tax. In letters written from London, the language of the East India Companys Court of Directors uctuated. At one moment they were issuing thundering directives to tax the black merchants by force, and at another they were advising gentleness and perswasion to entice the Gentues and Moores to take seats as aldermen of the Madras Corporation and pay the tax voluntarily. The companys local agents, by contrast, had more at stake in being consistently respectful, since they engaged heavily in illegal trade to supplement their low salaries, and were thus dependent on good personal relationships with the dubashes. Their tendency was to use Gentue Town and Malabar Town, and even Chennaipattanam, although Black Town grew in frequency. By the rst decade of the eighteenth century, Gentue and Malabar disappeared from local usage, after Pitt nally forced the black merchants to pay for the Black Town wall.28 The history of white as a self-designation for Europeans has a completely dif26 For a selection of travel writers use of color terms along the routes to the East, see Jan Huygen van Linschoten, The Voyage of John Huygen van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. Arthur Cooke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (1596; repr., New York, 1970), 28, 46, 64, 77, 94, 101, 126, 135, 183184, 255, 261, 269; Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 3: Travels in England, India, China, Etc., 1634 1638 (London, 1919), 233, 252, 260266, 312; and Pyrard, Voyage, 1: 6566. At Elmina, the African section was sometimes called the village of the blacks, but not ofcially; most other names for sections of cities reected architectural styles, not color: Intramuros at Manila, Casteel at Batavia, and Zona da Cimiento and Zona da Macuti (Cement Zone and Mangrove Zone) at Mocambique; Malyn Newitt, Mozambique Island: The Rise and Decline of an East African Coastal City, Portuguese Studies 20, no. 1 (2004): 31. 27 Linschoten, Voyage, 269. 28 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 84 85, 95, 118119, 198, 206207, 280, 368, 370371, 421 422, 432 433, 443, 454, 497 498; 2: 52. On the end of the Black Town wall crisis, see PC, vol. 35, July 25, 1706. Quote from directors in DfE, January 22, 1692. The authorities at Madras used the words treach-
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ferent chronology and global geography from that of black. The Spanish and Portuguese occasionally used it for themselves, in obvious contrast to negro, but like the Muslims they used it more systematically as a descriptive term for Arabs and other light-skinned Asians. In the realm of ofcial categories, Iberians in Asia much preferred to call themselves Christians or by their respective national designations, and other Europeans copied this practice in both East and West. In the sistema de castas of New Spain, negro was the bottom category, but the top category was almost always designated by the term Espanol. In Portuguese India, top place in a similar system was given to the reinois, those born in Portugal, not to whites. The Dutch appear to have almost entirely dispensed with white in the population registration systems of Java, preferring European. At Madras, during just about the entire seventeenth century, the European section of the city was universally called Christian Town.29 It was not until the 1660s that authorities in any European colony began to use the term white widely as an ofcial category. The practice probably began in the sugar colonies of the British West Indies. The rst censuses there, which date from 1661, universally use the dichotomy of white and black.30 This contrasts dramatically with similar documents from the same period from the British North American mainland. Historians Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington catalogued hundreds of citations to continental censuses and musters. Of the subset of these documents that distinguished Europeans from Africans, only one, a document from Rhode Island, used the category white before 1700. Terms such as English, Christians, freemen, and taxables abound, and one Massachusetts muster used the elliptical category souls besides the blacks. The earliest sustained use of white on the mainland comes from the slave laws of Virginia. In 1691, the legislature updated an earlier law forbidding sex between what they now called English
erous peoples and nations for any suspected enemy, including the Portuguese and Dutch. See Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 37, 39, 45, 246, 310. 29 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 538, 4253; she documents uses of the word blanco (211 n. 32 and 231 n. 91), but these are from the late eighteenth century; the word albino occurs in a painting on 54 55. Also, Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin, Tex., 2003), 44 105. In the Philippines, Spaniards deemed the white or light skin color of the Chinese a sign of superiority: e.g., Maximilianus Transylvanus, De Moluccis Insulis, in Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands, 14931898, 55 vols. (Cleveland, 1903), 1: 309. At Goa, Afonso da Albuquerque famously ordered his lieutenants to marry white and beautiful [alvas e de bom parecer] widows of Muslim traders he had slaughtered. Boxer, Race Relations, 64 65. On the Portuguese casta system, see Linschoten, Voyage, 46, 64, 67, 77, 94, 114, 126, 135, 183184, 255, 261, 269; Linschoten uses white man (wit man) only once, on p. 216. See also Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, 233, 261; and Pyrard, Voyage, 1: 12, 17, 6566. On Batavia, see Raben, Batavia and Colombo, 77116. The index to Love, Vestiges of Old Madras (vol. 4), contains an entry under Christian Town on pp. 3233 that gives numerous references to that naming convention. 30 Nancy Shoemaker speculates that Barbadian migrants to the Carolinas may have brought their usage of white to the mainland; A Strange Likeness, 129130. Seventeenth-century musters censuses from the West Indies and Bermuda, all containing white and black, can be found in W. N. Sainsbury et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. for 16691674 (Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 1964), 495 (Barbados, 1673); and at the Public Record Ofce, London, in the Colonial Ofce Record Group in the following locations: for Barbados, 29/2/4 5, 28 (1676); for Jamaica, 1/15/192 (1661), 1/45/96109 (1680); for the Leeward Islands, 1/42/195240 (1678); and for Bermuda, 37/2/19798 (1698). For Jamaica, see also Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624 1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 155, which gives a tabulation from censuses dating from 1662, 1670, and 1673 in addition to the 1661 document cited above.
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or other white women and black slaves. After about 1700, and especially after 1710, white appears in colonial documents with what, considering the slow pace of cultural historical change, must be called sudden profusion.31 In New York, in 1712, the principal categories that authorities used in counting the population were still Christians and Slaves. In 1723, however, the census of the colony rst used white and black, a practice repeated in 1737, 1746, and 1749. A similar transformation occurs in the language used in statutes, ordinances, reports, and ofcial correspondence.32 In Madras, the use of white increased at approximately the same time as on the North American mainland. Whyte Town rst occurred in an isolated incident in 1693, and then not again until 1711, on a map published under the orders of Governor Pitt (reproduced here as Map 1). Authorities were nevertheless very comfortable contrasting Black Town with Christian Town from the 1670s until about 1720, after which White Town took over as the most widely used designation again, the rst place in Asia where this was the case.33 Why would colonial authorities abandon Christian, a term that for centuries had marked them as instruments of Gods will, and instead identify themselves by the color white? Overarching explanations about the favorable meanings of whiteness in Western culture or a secularization of Western society probably do not help here, since neither could explain why white so swiftly and suddenly became a powerful term of group pride and solidarity in a succession of different British colonies.34 A more likely explanation involves political conicts between Europeans over class, religion, and nation that grew as the British formalized slavery in their American colonies. Such struggles began in the late 1650s, in discussions that linked the West Indies and Parliament in London. As the sugar revolution transformed is31 Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932). The Rhode Island document is on p. 62; the phrase souls besides the blacks is on p. 14. 32 For New York colonial censuses, see John Romeyn Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York Procured in Holland, England and France, ed. E. B. OCallahan, 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1855), 4: 420; 5: 340, 702, 929; 6: 133, 392, 550; and OCallahan, The Documentary History of the State of New-York, 4 vols. (Albany, 1849), 1: 240241, 467 474. I found no use of the word white before 1690 in the Brodhead or OCallahan collections just cited or in any of the following: E. B. OCallahan, Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New York, 16911743 (Albany, N.Y., 1861); City of New York, The Colonial Laws of New York, 5 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1894); and Osgood et al., Minutes of the Common Council. Christians is used occasionally, and ffreeman or woman professing Christianity (Colonial Laws, 1: 570 [1703], 762 [1712], 830 [1716], 889 [1716]). The words used most often for Europeans are freemen, masters or mistresses, and simply people or inhabitants. 33 PC, vol. 20, February 6, 1693. Thomas Salmons Modern History; or, The Present State of All Nations describes voyages to Madras in 16991701, and he uses White Town; however, his memoirs were not published until 1736, so this might reect later usage. See excerpts in Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 73. Alexander Hamilton also uses White Town in his A New Account of the East Indies, ed. William Foster, 2 vols. (London, 1930), 1: 192209; it was originally published in 1727 but refers to visits in 1707, 1711, and 1719. On dating Thomas Pitts map, see Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 8890. For other references to White Town, see PC, vol. 48, October 21, 1717; vol. 58, September 23 and October 14, 1728, and January 8, 1733; vol. 71, June 26 and 30, 1741; vol. 73, August 22 and October 17, 1743; vol. 75, June 4, 1745; vol. 81, January 19, 1749; and Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 395396, 425, 451, 520, 525, 573, 604, 609, 622; 3: 52, 8081, 167. In vol. 1, Love has reproduced a map of John Fryers from 16721681 and afxed the label White Town under it, but it was not in the original. John Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia, Being Nine Years Travels, 16721681, ed. William Crooke, 3 vols. (London, 1909), 1: facing 103. 34 Jordan, White over Black, 78; Fredrickson, Racism, 5254.
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lands such as Barbados into the wealthiest colonies of the British Empire, creating Britains rst true slave societies, the status of European indentured servants came into question. To many horried observers in London and the islands, such servants had been reduced to Christian slavesa term that sometimes was increasingly rendered as white slavesthreatening to make our lives . . . as cheap as negroes. Meanwhile, various clerics and later the Crown put increasing pressure on slaveholders to convert Africans to Christianity. Many slaveholders were reluctant to do so, fearing that conversion would result in emancipation. Morgan Godwyn, a prominent propagandist for slave conversion, inveighed against the tendency by which Negro and Christian, Englishmen and Heathen, are by idle corrupt Custom and Partiality made Opposites; thereby as it were implying, that the one could not be Christians, nor the other Indels. While no one ever made it an explicit policy, adopting white as the designation for free people instead of Christian could have claried such matters, defusing dissension between the Crown, the missionaries, and the slaveholders, as well as helping to cement political support among European colonists of different classes and persuasions in defense of slavery.35 This alliance between whites in the British colonies also reected different demographic conditions and gender politics than existed in New Spain, where the larger Native and smaller European female populations led to a plebeian class of mixed Indian, black, and European heritage. Elite power there rested on segmenting plebeians into dozens of casta categories. In British colonies, larger white female populations created a larger unmixed population, so authorities resorted to a politics of whiteness, which purchased the allegiance of poorer European colonists by offering the compensatory illusion of sharing elite status with slaveholders.36 In New York, the process of establishing and formalizing slavery occurred later than elsewhere in British Americaand so did the arrival of black-white politics. Leslie Harris has argued that as European indentured servants became more likely to outlive their terms of service in the 1690s, they could put greater pressure on slaveholders to reserve certain areas of labor to them, not hired-out black slaves, thus forcing slaveholders to negotiate across class boundaries for political support. Thelma Wills Foote adds that British authorities at New York needed to unite a restive population with origins in many nations of northern Europe. Economic and national struggles had fueled Jacob Leislers revolution against British authorities in 16891692, for example. Since more slaves had also converted to Christianity by
35 Quotes on white slaves from Hillary McD. Beckles, The Hub of Empire: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century, in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 228232. See also Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 238246. Historians of Virginia note similar processes at work in the aftermath of Bacons Rebellion: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 327329; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London, 1997), 203238. Quote from Morgan Godwyn, The Negros and Indians Advocate (London, 1680), 36. Godwyn uses white frequently; see, e.g., 4, 24, 39, 84. On the Crowns pressure to convert slaves in New York, see Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 3: 374, 547, 690, 823; 4: 138, 290, 510511. 36 On the use of casta categories for social control, see Katzew, Casta Painting, 42 48. A white-black dichotomy also seems to have arisen at about the same time in the French Caribbean. See Antoine Gisler, ` ` Lesclavage aux Antilles francaises (XVII eXIX e siecle): Contribution au probleme de lesclavage (Fribourg, 1965), 86100. On the very different use of terms such as grands blancs and petits blancs in the later eighteenth century, however, see John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French SaintDomingue (New York, 2006), 5182.
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the rst decades of the 1700s, whiteness could well have offered more than Christianity as the ideological basis for such an alliance between Europeans. New Yorks role as a provisioner of the West Indian sugar plantations grew dramatically after the turn of the century, as did the number of slaves in the city and the numbers of hard-bitten, white-identied, expatriate West Indian slaveholders. Such developments echoed those that had occurred a decade or so earlier in the Chesapeake, where white came into widespread use sooner than in New York.37 If whiteness went hand in hand with the rise of British American slave societies, what, then, was the role of the Indian Ocean world in the rise of the black-white dichotomy? The spatial movement of whiteness across time strongly suggests some kind of trade in color concepts from West to East. However, the records from Madras and New York contain only inconclusive testimony on this question, and it will take a different line of research to determine how, and under whose auspices, the eastern and western wings of the early modern British Empire met and shared ideas. Ofcials in both cities made only passing references to people and places outside the scope of operations of their respective colonial institutions. We know, however, that many East India Company directors invested in American ventures. Some also served in Parliament, so they might have been familiar with the growing use of white and black in English discussions of slavery. Philip J. Stern points to the pivotal inuence of the company court director Josiah Child, who had much interest in imperial policy in general and American slavery in particular. Childs letters to the governors of Madras, however, do not make allusion to color politics in the Americas. Two of the most celebrated governors of Madras during the years immediately preceding the adoption of white for EuropeansThomas Pitts predecessors Elihu Yale and Nathaniel Higginsonwere born in New England. Yale left as a very young boy, however, and got into the business of endowing a college in New Haven only at an advanced age. Higginson grew up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College in 1670, and left for England in 1674. Thus, if he had direct knowledge of the changing color politics of slavery in the mainland colonies, it would have been earlier than the changes described here. Travel writers may have played a bridging role, by familiarizing readers across the empire with the political mores of places on opposite sides of the world. Their use of color terms as descriptions of people could well have served as the model for the politicized use of black and white. Color politics, like slavery, was of course alive in early modern Britain itself, and the growing persecution of blacks there in the early eighteenth century may have also inuenced the mindset of ofcials who spurred concepts of whiteness in the East.38 Whatever the answer to this question about the operation of global intellectual connections, the contingencies of hemispheric and especially local politics in early
37 Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 1617, 34; and Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford, 2005), 91158. 38 Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 15751630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Stern, British Asia and British Atlantic, 698702; Bernard Steiner, Two New England Rulers of Madras, South Atlantic Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1902): 209223. On color politics in Britain, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race ; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 83156; Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 15551833 (London, 1977), esp. 84 114; Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, 2002), 3 43.
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British India clearly did leave an enduring mark on the worlds color lines. At Madras, the pairing of white and black t different political needs than in the Atlantic, and gave new life to a different institution, the divided colonial city. Color politics, and the designation White Town in particular, was not intended to forge a new political alliance between whites, but to tacitly renegotiate one between the East India Company and the citys important populations of Portuguese and Armeniansa situation that also distinguished Madras from most other cities in its hemisphere. Both of these groups had been allowed to live at Madras since the citys originsthe Portuguese to shore up the small British army, and the Armenians because of their connections to Indian courts and their long-standing trade contacts with the Middle East. Among other things, the designation Christian Town functioned to welcome both of these groups and to encourage their loyaltyindeed, for a while, authorities even circulated a plan to double the size of Christian Town to allow more Armenians to settle there.39 By the early eighteenth century, however, the company was showing increasing impatience with its Christian allies. The Portuguese had long been subject to suspicion because their Inquisition-minded priests lurked in the nearby settlement of Sao Thome, and because they often deserted the defenses of Madras or spied for rivals. The Armenians increasingly fell behind on their taxes; traded with the French, Dutch, and Danes; ignored the authority of Madras courts in adjudicating their disputes; and were often suspected of treachery during wartime.40 Although both groups were manifestly Christian, the British held them to be of indeterminate colorsometimes they were pigeonholed as white, sometimes by the Portuguese casta term musteez (mestico), and sometimes they took places in long lists of Indian castes. In this linguistic context, the name White Town seems to have t a general strategy among British authorities to cool their welcome of the Portuguese and Armenians, and to keep disloyal members of both ambiguously colored communities on notice.41 Indeed, the new designation was increasingly invoked in the context of growing calls to kick the companys Christian allies out of the more privileged section of town. A long period of prosperity and relative political peace began in Madras during the 1720s, attracting more resident English merchants and soldiers, and putting pressure on the nite space in White Town. Competition over real estate, especially with
39 English Town, which was used by some contemporaries, could have evoked nationalist or royalist passion, but it would have undercut alliances with the Portuguese and Armenians. It does not appear in ofcial documents. That European Town was not adopted, despite the widespread use of European in Dutch population registration systems at Batavia, further suggests that Christian Town may have served to welcome Armenians. See, for example, Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1: 184 185. 40 On complaints about the Armenians, see PC, vol. 22, November 28, 1695 (taxes); vol. 25, May 31, 1697 (interlopers); vol. 32, May 7, 1703; DfE, April 16, 1697, nos. 5 and 8; DfE, February 12, 1713, 94; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 231232, 308, 425, 573; Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1: 240, 2: 247248. 41 On efforts to categorize the Portuguese, see Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 183, 376, 387388, 441, 481, 529; 2: 128; PC, vol. 17, February 7 and July 21, 1690; vol. 20, October 23, 1693; vol. 21, April 19, 1694. On the Armenians, see DfE, April 11, 1688; PC, vol. 17, March 6 and April 26, 1690; Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1: 184 185, 204; 2: 273276, 247248; PC, vol. 22, November 28, 1695; DfE, April 16, 1697, nos. 5 and 8; PC, vol. 35, July 6, 1706; DfE, January 16, 1706; PC, vol. 41, June 15, 1710, and vol. 45, July 29, 1714; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 231232, 308, 395396, 425 426, 573.
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Armenians, exacerbated tensions.42 In 1749, when the East India Company regained Madras after the devastating French occupation, local company ofcials fullled the veiled threat contained in the designation White Town. Some Armenians and Portuguese had sided with the French and enriched themselves off of the occupation. In response, the British passed new ordinances that for the rst time explicitly forbade Armenians and Portuguese from settling in White Town. Houses were conscated, a pitiful sum was paid in compensation, and both groups were sent to live in the new Black Town four hundred yards distant from the fort. While this latest spasm of separation lasted, it rested upon the most exclusive possible interpretation of local color categories.43
HISTORIANS HAVE LONG WANTED TO ATTRIBUTE THESE DEVELOPMENTS to race or racial formation, especially those who argue that slavery was a racial institution from its origins. At least at Madras and Manhattan, however, early colonial authorities did not engage in the formation or construction of racial categories of any sort, since they did not nd race at all useful for their political or institutional goals. To them, the concepts of human difference that mattered were nations and peoples. The concepts color and complexion grew more important, too, as white and black came into greater usage, especially in New York. As late as 1744, when the New Yorker Daniel Horsmanden chronicled the repression of allegedly one of the largest slave conspiracies in the Americas, he used color and complexion instead of nationbut never raceas a general container for white and black. The rst references to race in Madras do not appear until the 1770s.44 Winthrop Jordan has written of the North Atlantic world that until well into the eighteenth century there was no debate as to whether the Negros non-physical characteristics were inborn and unalterable; such a question was never posed with anything like sufcient clarity for men to debate it.45 However, the ofcial language of the color line in both New York and Madras, and the policies it helped to support, make clear that intellectual and political experiments of some kind were going on,
42 DfE, February 12, 1713, 94; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 308; Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1: 240, 2: 247248. 43 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 231232, 308, 395396, 425 426, 573. 44 Proving the complete absence of anything in such a vast Babel as was any colonial city is of course impossible. The publication of thousands of pages of documents from both cities in indexed volumes has, however, helped me make a pretty good survey. The only use of the word race before 1740 that I encountered occurs in some propositions made to New York authorities by what were called the praying Indians of the three tribes or races of the Maquass [Mohawks] in a 1691 document; Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 3: 770. In Asia, travel writers use race rarely to describe people in Asia, and as in this New York instance almost always to describe groups of common ancestry. See Linschoten, Voyage, 27; Mundy, Travels, 263. Pyrard de Laval uses race to describe Indian Brahmins and Banians, perhaps picking up on the hereditarian bases of the caste system; Voyage, 1: 38, 751; 2: 343, 348, 374. These suggest that race might have been more prevalent in spoken language than in written ofcial documents; if so, it reinforces my contention that colonial authorities had access to the concept but did not nd it useful to accomplish their goals. In any case, words such as nation and people are innitely more common in all of these types of sources. Travel writers use synonyms for ancestry groupssuch as posterity, seed, and issueat least as commonly as race. On Horsmandens use of color and complexion, see Daniel Horsmanden, The New-York Conspiracy; or, A History of the Negro Plot (1810; repr., New York, 1969), 354, 363, 369, 371. 45 Jordan, White over Black, 26. Joyce Chaplin gives some examples of more explicit contemporary thinking on similar matters in Subject Matter, 79201.
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unstated as they may have been, regarding links between skin color and moral characteristics, the possibility that the two might be inherited alongside each other, and the role of sex in the process. For starters, white and black were not solely abstract terms in either city: they referred to perceived, heritable features of peoples bodies. Thus, even as authorities in both cities prioritized the black-white dichotomy, they retained terms such as mulatto and mestizo, borrowed from Iberian casta systems, as subordinate categories to designate people who inherited those physical characteristics from parents of different colors. But the differences between the two places were even more suggestive. Once again, the early modern histories of color politics and ideas about heritability and sex appear to have been loosely connected at best, even within the British Empire subject to political contingencies operating on multiple geographic scales. The biggest irony of our tale of two cities is that authorities in segregated Madras often encouraged cross-color sex, while in integrated New York, many saw cross-color sex (and certainly black mens sex with white women) as an abomination. In New York, unlike Madras, authorities also fanned such concerns to transform the color line into the conceptual basis for a system of inherited legal status. Because few European women could be persuaded to migrate halfway around the world to Madras, many East India Company ofcials, including Court Director Josiah Child, thought that intermarriage with locals would be the only way to guarantee a loyal population in the city. Once again, this policy was a Dutch import, for as Child noted, authorities at Batavia had long debated the merits of intermarriage, and crosscolor unions were very common. Dissenters in this debate existed as well, including the company agent who in 1666 urged more imports of British women so that your Towne might be populous of our owne and not a mixt Nacao. (In so doing, the agent demonstrated that heritability could be linked to the concept of nation, and also signaled another intra-imperial connection, with Portuguese concepts.) However, to the extent that we can even read such things into the sources, questions of heritability and sex seem to have been largely insignicant to the adoption of both black and white in Madras politics. Even though considerably more British women migrated to South Asia after 1720, the embrace of whiteness does not seem to be linked to a sudden jump in the desire to restrict sex to the boundaries of the color group. Indeed, the policy of encouraging cross-color marriages was not ofcially abandoned until the late eighteenth century, and then only when concerns explicitly voiced in terms of race were brought up against it. Furthermore, the capacity of the White TownBlack Town dichotomy to work as a cautionary tale about Armenian and Portuguese loyalty depended upon sustaining color ambiguity, not melding mixed people permanently into either category. If there was a characteristic inherent to ambiguously colored people, it was that a moral attribute, their degree of loyalty, determined whether they were white or black, not the other way around. In any case, the conclusion that northern European cultures were much more wary than Iberians about cross-color sex is not supported by evidence from early Dutch or British Asia.46
46 Childs efforts can be found in DfE, vol. 8, April 8, 1687, and vol. 9, January 28, 1688. Quote from Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 247. On Batavia, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 16001800 (Harmondsworth, 1965), 219230. On later prohibitions of cross-color sex, see Durban Ghosh, Colonial
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In New York, as elsewhere in British America, questions of cross-color sex and heritability aroused much greater concern, ultimately nding institutional expression in inherited legal statuses based on color. The Dutch once again set the tone when they outlawed non-conjugal sex between Christians and Negroes in New Amsterdam as early as 1638. British authorities subsequent efforts to control slaves movements were heavily directed at their interactions with poorer whites in taverns, where sex (and conspiracy) across the color line was presumed to be rife. Cross-color sex was associated with a prurience and a sense of moral disgust that was mostly absent in contemporary Madras. As early as 1664, a British law had implied that slavery was an inherited status associated with color. In 1706, in the wake of escalating slave insubordination in New York City, the colonial legislature more explicitly linked slavery to the small galaxy of categories Negro, Indian, Mullato, and Mestee Bastard Child or Children as a way of establishing that slave status would follow ye state of the Mother. The heritability of white skin might also have been a factor in replacing Christian with white as the ofcial category for non-slaves during the same period. This was not, however, as Thelma Wills Foote describes it, a point at which the discursive construction of race began to take on its modern biologized form under a racist state apparatus. It was a highly contingent political decision to fuse otherwise independent currents of thoughtthe heritability of human moral and somatic characteristics with a pair of newly adopted color categories, themselves seen as nations or complexionsin the interest of urban social control and the formalization of a slave society.47
WHAT CATEGORIES OF HUMAN DIFFERENCE DID HISTORICAL ACTORS PRIVILEGE at any given time and place? How did they use them? For what purposes? And why those particular choices? By asking questions such as these, instead of assessing whether languages of difference approached or deviated from an externally imposed denition of race, we can identify some of the contingencies involved in the intellectual, political, and institutional development of color lines in the early modern world. Read in trans-hemispheric contexts, the ofcial discourses of color in two cities reveal the temporal and spatial dimensions of these contingencies. Decisions to attach white to black, to link nations and peoples with colors, and to associate color with the heritability of xed moral or legal characteristics and sexuality were never inevitable. Nor was it foreordained that colonial authorities would apply these intellectual connections to urban politics and then deploy them to build support for institutions such as residential separation and slavery. In fact, the politics of urban space, with its focus on defense and control, was highly dependent upon the gulf in empire-building between East and West, as well as European empires sharing of
Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India, 17601830 (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2000), 34 80. 47 Hodges, Root and Branch, 12, 48, 9394; Edwin Vernon Morgan, Slavery in New York: The Status of the Slave under the English Colonial Government, Papers of the American Historical Association 5 (1891): 316; An Act to Incourage the Baptizing of Negro, Indian, and Mulatto Slaves, passed October 21, 1706, in Colonial Laws of New York, 1: 597598; Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 127128, 152 156.
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concepts and policies within each hemisphere. Black-white politics, by contrast, seems to have come to both New York and Madras when the otherwise divided British Empire gained the capacity to transmit ideas within and then across the hemispheresalthough further research will be necessary to determine exactly how. The Atlantic world, and especially its sugar plantation colonies, does seem to deserve a reputation for innovations in the politics and institutions of color lines. If theorists of the racial origins of slavery have one thing right, it is that the politics of Atlantic slavery depended on a politics of colorthat is, of blacknessfrom the moment of its fteenth-century inception, if not before. Whiteness came much later. But long before white or black became associated with a concept of race, color politics was capable of boosting substantial increases in European imperial control in both East and West. Non-racial whiteness also helped generate political support for key institutions of unequal wealth-holdingin commerce, slaves, and real estatethat were as formidable as any described by Cheryl I. Harris or David Roediger in later periods.48 Along the way, cities mattered very much, too, in both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. As increasingly world-spanning phenomena, Western color lines took the specic shape they did to serve some colonial authorities efforts to defend and control their cities, by intervening in the politics of even smaller spacesresidential neighborhoods, streets, taverns, households, and even bedrooms. The very complexity, variability, and perhaps ungovernability of those urban places taxed authorities in ways that forced them to innovate politically; thus, cities were creators as well as creations of the global color line. The particular demographic or political economic development of individual places could determine much about the timing and the particular meanings associated with color categories as well as the shape of the institutions they inspired. The very residential structure of cities could also symbolically tell key parables about the unequal order of white and black. Madrass gleaming White Town and its dowdier Black Town, for example, impressed travelers on their way to the newer city of Calcutta, which adopted similar designations in somewhat different political circumstances. A more ambiguous version was also debated at Bombay, and later British colonial cities further adapted the pattern.49 Later, from the late eighteenth century on, race did become much more widely used; its denition was vastly expanded and increasingly contested (although it was never unambiguously more full-blown); and its political inuence became pivotal to world history. It took planet-shaking modern events to make this soEnlightenment science, egalitarian political revolution, industrial labor struggle, the invention of capitalist property markets, professionalized urban reform, bourgeois sexuality, and the modern advance of world-spanning empires. But citiesand the complex politics of their increasingly multifarious spacescontinued to play key, if
48 Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 17071791; David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How Americas Immigrants Became WhiteThe Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, 2005). 49 The enormous inuence of Madras on Calcutta can be followed in the original sources in C. R. Wilson, ed., Old Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Ofcial Documents Dealing with Its History, 2 vols. (London, 1906), 1: 2838, 74 78, 9093, 158167, 173178, 214 222; 2: 4 20, 112118, 129132. On Madras and Bombay, see Dulcinea Correa Rodrigues, Bombay Fort in the Eighteenth Century (Bombay, 1994), 5859, 72115; and S. M. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect (Bombay, 1902), 104 109, 138, 146, 152153, 170178, 206, 229238.
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always still contingent and never preordained, roles in the ongoing reconguration of the global color line. As Atlantic slavery rst expanded, then fell, during this new age of race, the White Towns and Black Towns of the East rose in importance as institutions of racial inequality, especially as new colonial cities cropped up across Asia and Africa, including South Africa. There, new, explicitly racialized concerns tied to public health and other great urban reform crusades as well as to commodied real estate marketsvied for importance in segregationist thinking alongside recongured issues of urban defense and control. Early colonial urban separation is often dismissed in modern accounts of racial segregation,50 but many of the techniques employed in the modern eraracial zoning laws (with their exceptions for live-in servants), restrictions of property sales, property conscation, urban cordons sanitaires, dual housing markets, dual scal systems, and ofcial encouragement of white suburbanizationbore a resemblance to those used in the early modern past, even if their adoption was doubtlessly dependent on new, unforeseen political turns operating on many geographic scales. By the twentieth century, however, Madrass long-forgotten role as an avatar of color segregation was thoroughly eclipsed by the big shadow of an American former slave city, New York. By late in the century, New Yorks segregated ghettos, Harlem and the South Bronx, became key symbols of the worlds race politics, as authorities in places such as London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Rio, and even Johannesburg contemplated the contingencies of yet a new generation of urban and global color lines.51
50 For example, see John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982), 23, 55. 51 I develop these arguments in Nightingale, The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation, and Carl H. Nightingale, A Tale of Three Global Ghettos: How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History, Journal of Urban History 29 (March 2003): 257271.
Carl H. Nightingale is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he has taught since 2005. He is the author of On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (Basic Books, 1993) and a series of articles concerned with the intersection of urban history, race, and world history. He is working on a book titled Race and the City: How the Invention of Urban Residential Color Lines Changed World History, which looks at the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of the worldwide proliferation of race-segregated cities around the turn of the twentieth century.
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Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003

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Periodizing U.S. Ghettos in Global Context

National trends in wealth and income inequality, job markets

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Dynamics of urban residential segregation

Trends in spatial segregation

Increasing segregation; creation of large, contiguous majority-black racial ghettos

264 TABLE 1 (continued)

First Ghetto (Approximately 1900-1933)

Second Ghetto (Approximately 1933-1968)

Third Ghetto (Approximately 1968-?)

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003

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Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003

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Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003

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Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS

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THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL GONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

THE TEIANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SECRECATION

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION

journal of social history

Buffalo, NY 14260 ENDNOTES

journal of social history

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION