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Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing Urban Roles in Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Rhoads Murphey
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The subject of this essay—better so labeled than as a research paper—is too broad to permit more than a sweeping as well as selective treatment in the short space of a journal article. It may nevertheless be worth presenting in those terms, painting with an overly broad brush on too large a canvas perhaps, but attempting through its scope to relate as parts of a common phenomenon events and patterns in separate areas. Such an effort may help to throw light on an aspect of the grand design of European colonialism in Asia and on some of its consequences. These were different in each area and some of the differences, notably between China and the rest of Asia, may be instructive as they can help us better to understand idiosyncratic aspects of the diverse history of modern Asia. But the similarities in events, patterns, and consequences which such a gross comparison can also illustrate may be equally instructive, and often overlooked. India's modern history and China's, Japan's, and Southeast Asia's, are for good reasons commonly examined separately by separate specialists. Many politically conscious Asians of the colonial or semi-colonial period, and most of the colonialists themselves, did not see Asia that way but more nearly as a single system, for all its regional variety, on which the overt and implicit force of the modern West as an alien system was attempting to impinge.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , November 1969 , pp. 67 - 84
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1969

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References

1 Such an analysis, of course, glosses over basic differences in the Western impact from one period to another, and in any one period between its different components. But in every Asian country touched by the West, missionaries, traders, and consuls/administrators played similar roles at similar times.

2 Throughout this essay “Asia” refers to the area between the Khyber Pass and Hokkaido and from Indonesia to the present Afghan and Soviet borders.

3 For an excellent discussion of the traditional Chinese city as a cosmic creation and of the extent to which it represented and served a homogeneous culture largely lacking the urban—rural dichotomy more familiar in the Western experience, see Mote, F. W., “The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400,”Google Scholar forthcoming as part of a volume on the pre-modern Chinese city edited by G. W. Skinner and J. W. Lewis, to be published by Stanford University Press in 1970.

4 See Chang, S. D., “Some Aspects of the Urban Geography of the Chinese Hsien Capital,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LI (1961), 23–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Travellers' descriptions of seventeenth-century India are numerous. Two convenient collections may be cited here: das Gupta, J. N., ed., India in the Seventeenth Century. (Calcutta: 1916)Google Scholar; and Foster, Wm., ed., Early Travels in India, (London: 1921).Google Scholar

6 See, for example, Hall, J. W., “The Traditional Japanese City,”Google Scholar forthcoming as part of a volume on the pre-modern Chinese city edited by G. W. Skinner and J. W. Lewis, to be published by Stanford University Press in 1970, and “The Castle Town and Japan's Modern Urbanization,” Far Eastern Quarterly, XIV (1955), 37–56Google Scholar; Wheatley, Paul, “What the Greatness of the City is Said to Be,” Pacific Viewpoint, IV (1963), 163–88Google Scholar; McGee, T. G., The Southeast Asian City, (London: 1967).Google Scholar

7 For an essay contrasting urban roles in western Europe and traditional China, see Murphey, R., “The City as a Centre of Change: Western Europe and China,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, XLIV (1954), 349–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Only Japan remained fully independent, although even there extraterritoriality and other special rights for Westerners stemming from a set of “unequal treaties” as in China, especially in the treaty-ports of Kanagawa-Yokohama, Shimoda, Hakodate, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Kobe (Hyogo), remained in force from the 1850's to 1899; Japanese tariff autonomy was not regained until 1911. A more thoroughgoing and long-lasting semicolonial system was imposed on China and Thailand.

9 Asia and Western Dominance, (London: 1953).Google Scholar

10 Population statistics available for the countries and cities in question, now or at the time of independence, are of widely varying reliability and usability. In most cases, urban population figures are also ambiguous in terms of the extent of the conurbation they include, and are seldom reliably comparable within any one country or between different census periods. A variety of population totals can readily be obtained, from different and often conflicting sources, for all of the cities considered here, but in very few cases can they be used with confidence except as indicating a general order of magnitude. For this reason, I have not attempted to list exact populations for any of these cities at any period, but their ranking within each country, including the period 1870–1940, is perfectly clear.

11 For more detail on Bangkok, see Hall, D. G. E., A History of Southeast Asia, (London: 1955), pp. 389–402Google Scholar; for Rangoon, see Pearn, B. R., A History of Rangoon, (Rangoon: 1939).Google Scholar

12 Census figures are available for India from 1872, and although there are numerous and continued ambiguities and inconsistencies in the urban count, the ranking is unmistakable. For Indonesia there is much less statistical material, but the census of 1930 shows a marked pattern of urban concentration which is at least generally valid.

13 The Statistical Abstract of India, an annual publication, lists total trade values and shipping tonnages for all important ports from 1909; earlier all-India figures refer only to states or presidencies and do not distinguish individual ports, although they do suggest a closely similar pattern. See also footnote 15.

14 Hong Kong and Canton are best regarded for trade statistical purposes as a single unit. The Annual Returns of Trade published each year from 1864 for all of the “open” ports by the foreign-administered Maritime Customs Service until its dissolution include figures for the total value of trade at each port and for the country as a whole, plus tonnages of shipping entered and cleared, by ports and in grand total. See also footnote 15.

15 It is even more difficult in Asia than in most of the rest of the world to obtain accurate, mean ingful, or comparable figures showing the volume of trade through the various ports, especially before about 1950. The only widely (though by no means uniformly) available data, generally between about 1880 and 1938, are those listing gross registered tons of shipping entered and cleared (sometimes, especially in earlier years, only the total number of ships). This does not, of course, have any necessary relationship to actual cargo passing in or out, and in any case tends misleadingly to exaggerate the importance of ports of call, for example, Colombo, where a great deal of the shipping using the port was in fact carrying cargo to and from elsewhere and might do minimal loading or unloading. For this reason, no attempt is made here to show any but the most general ranking, where the data permit, or to measure the quantitative importance of the ports.

16 Two recent studies have made this especially clear in the Indian case: Broomfield, J. H., Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century Bengal, (Berkeley: 1968)Google Scholar; and Seal, Anil, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century, (New York: 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The China experience and context were different, but there too the treaty ports acted as both goad and model for the development of Chinese nationalism. This is effectively portrayed in Levenson, J. R.'s magistral work Confucian China and its Modern Fate, 3 vols., (Berkeley: 1958–1965)Google Scholar, but see also Eastman, Lloyd, “Political Reformism in China Before the Sino-Japanese War,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXVII (1968), 695–710CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Po-tsan, Chien et al. eds., Wu-hsu pien-fa (The reform movement of 1898), 4 vols., (Shanghai: 1957)Google Scholar, especially Vol. IV.

17 The mixing in these cities of people and cultures previously isolated from each other, and their growth largely as a result of in-migration in response to new economic opportunity and greater physical security, contributed to their closely similar character in every Asian country. For a study of a typical and early-developed example, see Bose, N. K., “Calcutta: A Premature Metropolis,” Scientific American, CXIII (Sept. 1965), 91–102.Google Scholar

18 For a more detailed discussion of the capital issue, see Murphey, R., “New Capitals of Asia,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, V (1957). 216–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and references cited therein.

19 For two readable and reliable surveys of this period and its shipping, see Cipolla, C. M., Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion: 1400 to 1700 (London: 1965)Google Scholar and Parry, J. H., The Age of Reconaissance, (London: 1963)Google Scholar; two summary studies are by Boxer, C. R.: Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, (Johannesburg: 1961)Google Scholar, and The Dutch Seaborne Empire, (London: 1965)Google Scholar. Parkinson, C. N. in his Trade in The Eastern Seas (Cambridge: 1937)Google Scholar, deals with some of these matters as well as describing (pp. 320 ff.) the practice among Asian shipbuilders, especially along the west coast of India after the first Portuguese impact, of adopting a Western-looking rig in the hope of scaring off pirates; dummy gun ports were also often added.

20 “Factors in the Development of Capital Cities,” The Geographical Review, XXXII (1942), 622–31.Google Scholar

21 Sources dealing with this period and with the great variety of smaller ports which were then important are numerous, and make fascinating reading. Two examples may be given here: Bowrey, Thomas, Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669–1679, ed. Temple, R. C., (Cambridge: 1905)Google Scholar, and Hamilton, Alexander, A New Account of the East Indies (first published London: 1727), ed. Foster, W., 2 vols., (London: 1930)Google Scholar. Some of this material is summarized in (among a great number of other secondary sources) Harlow, V. T., The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–93, 2 vols., (London: 1952)Google Scholar; Harlow in turn draws heavily on the account of Dalrymple, Alexander, A Plan for Extending the Commerce of this Kingdom and of the East India Company, (London: 1769).Google Scholar

22 For an account of Calcutta's harbor problems during the colonial period, see Murphey, R., “The City in the Swamp: Aspects of the Site and Early Growth of Calcutta,” The Geographical Journal, CXXX (1964), 241–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mitra, P. B., “The Port of Calcutta,” Calcutta Municipal Gazette, L (Sept. 17, 1949), 494–96Google Scholar, provides a more recent but very brief survey. Bagchi, K., The Ganges Delta, (Calcutta: 1944)Google Scholar, is a book-length study primarily of the geological and hydrographic aspects of the area. Logan, M., “The Port of Calcutta,” PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1949Google Scholar, is a useful economic study.

23 Coastal sites for cities had also been avoided in the past partly because of piracy, which was endemic in the Bay of Bengal, along most of the coasts of Malaysia and its adjacent areas, and along the south China coast. Nambiar, O. K., Portuguese Pirates and Indian Seamen, (Mysore: 1955)Google Scholar, and Fox, Grace, British Admirals and Chinese Pirates, (London: 1940)Google Scholar, provide two accounts. In Ming and Ch'ing China the problem was severe enough during the height of Japanese pirate depredations that the government attempted to evacuate all settlements from the coastal zone—see Kuochen, Hsieh, “Ch'ing-ch'u tung-nan yen-hai ch'ien” (The evacuation of the south-east coast in early Ch'ing), Kuohsueh chi-k'an, II (December 1930), 797–826Google Scholar. On Japanese piracy in the Ming more generally, see Mao-heng, Ch'en, “Ming-tai wo-k'ou k'ao-lueh” (Japanese pirate attacks during the Ming), Yenching hsüeh-pao. Monograph Series No. 6, (Peking: 1934).Google Scholar

24 I have given a summary account of this problem in “The City in the Swamp …,” The Geographical Journal, CXXX (1964), 241–56.Google Scholar

25 Trade in the Eastern Seas, (Cambridge: 1937), pp. 71–74.Google Scholar

26 The Wealth of Nations, (London: 1776), p. 605.Google Scholar

27 Martin, J. R., Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta, (Calcutta: 1837)Google Scholar, printed in Appendix XVI of the Census of India, 1951, Vol. I, Part II, 37–53.Google Scholar

28 Quoted in Lanning, George, A History of Shanghai, (Shanghai: 1923), p. 134.Google Scholar

29 Before about 1800 Bombay was, in fact, inconveniently isolated, easily defended as a chain of seven originally separate islands but cut off from the main streams of trade, although prominent as a center for ship-building and repair. The most detailed account of Bombay's early history is given in Malabari, P. M., Bombay in the Making, 1661–1726, (London: 1910)Google Scholar; but see also Edwardes, S. M., The Rise of Bombay, (Bombay: 1902)Google Scholar. On the development of the shipyards in the eighteenth century, see Wadia, R. A., The Bombay Dockyards and the Wadia Master Builders, (2nd ed., Bombay: 1957)Google Scholar. Leacock, S. and Mandelbaum, D. G., “A Nineteenth Century Development Project in India: The Cotton Improvement Program,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, III, (1955), 334–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, gives an account of the development of cotton production for export from the Deccan, Gujerat, and the Indus Valley.

30 The earlier trading city of Sinhapura—the “lion city”—from which Raffles, with his keen sense of history and his interest in the old sea-based empire of Majapahit, took the name, had ceased to exist long before 1819.

31 Later in the nineteenth century missionaries were permitted by treaty provision to negotiate long-term leases of land and to build mission stations, although even these activities were periodically contested locally—see Cohen, Paul, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Anti-Foreignism, 1860–1870, (Cambridge, Mass.: 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 For a detailed study of this system, and its implications in helping both to describe and to explain how and why traditional China managed so successfully to resist Western-style commercialization and institutional change, see Skinner, G. W., “Marketing and Social Structural in Rural China,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXIV (1964–1965) 3–43, 195–228, and 369–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 I develop the foregoing and following arguments in considerably greater detail in “The Treaty Ports and China's Modernization: What Went Wrong?” forthcoming as part of a volume on Chinese urbanization edited by G. W. Skinner and J. W. Lewis, to be published by Stanford University Press in 1970.

34 Dairen is especially unrepresentative, since it served the Manchurian economy, increasingly after 1905 a piece of outright colonial property, as China Proper never was, where Japanese investment in agriculture, mining, and railways was very great and where the entire economy was remade under Japanese colonial control. The Manchurian experience pointedly contrasts with that of the rest of China, and calls attention to the importance of effective territorial control and investment as a condition of economic development and modernization. Hong Kong has, of course, been since its establishment foreign territory, not part of China.

35 For assessments of the Portuguese impact, see Masselman, G., The Cradle of Colonialism, (New Haven: 1962), p. 220 ff.Google Scholar; Meilink-Roelofsz, M. A. P., Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago, (The Hague: 1962), pp. 134 ff., 178 ff.Google Scholar; and Van Leur, J. C., Indonesian Trade and Society, (The Hague: 1955), p. 162 ff.Google Scholar

36 The pattern of interaction between center and periphery has common features in many historical settings; transformation of the center through changes initiated at the periphery, and often of alien origin, has, in fact, been widespread in many parts of the world. For a provocative discussion of this (among other matters), see Wolf, E. R., “Understanding Civilizations: A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, IX (1967), 446–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the several studies cited therein.

37 Letter dated Nov. 4, 1676, from the factors at Surat to those at Bombay, quoted in Furber, Holden, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, (London: 1965), p. 176.Google Scholar

38 Letter from the East India Company directors in London to the Company's Government in Bombay, dated March 15, 1748, quoted in Edwardes, S. M., The Rise of Bombay, (Bombay: 1902), p. 172.Google Scholar

39 For an interesting general discussion which includes a typology of colonial cities as “parasitic,” see Hoselitz, B. F., “Generative and Parasitic Cities,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, III (1954), 278–94Google Scholar. Colonial cities are considered in a somewhat different context, as being “heterogenetic” as opposed to “orthogenetic” by Red-field, Robert and Singer, Milton in “The Cultural Role of the Cities,” loc. cit., III (1954) 53–73Google Scholar, and are specifically contrasted with the “orthogenetic” capitals of the Great Traditions.