Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Cosmopolitan Cities
Chair: Katrina Gulliver (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
This panel brings together three papers discussing the theme of cosmopolitanism in an urban setting, through the lens of distinct cultural groups. The speakers examine migration, location and ethnicity in the formation of identity in a 'new' city, and the contributions of arrival groups to urban culture. Spanning the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, when waves of migration created new diasporic communities, these papers raise issues of cosmopolitan participation versus urban segregation.
Abstracts
Irish and Indian Cosmopolitan
Nationalists in Late-Victorian London
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre (University of Exeter)
In the late nineteenth century Irish and Indian constitutional nationalists expressed affinity and sympathy for each others' causes, in print media and in political speeches and ephemera. It was through meeting in London, however, that this affinity produced actual political results: Irish support for the election of Dadabhai Naoroji to Parliament, and selection of the Irish MP Alfred Webb as president of the Indian National Congress. This paper will explore the politicised spaces and sites in London where individuals like Webb and Naoroji met, shared their common experience as 'peripherals' in the imperial capital, and conceptualised a cosmopolitan and civic nationalism.
Cosmopolitan Alexandria, Egypt and the Italian Diaspora in the Nineteenth Century
Elizabeth Shlala (Georgetown University)
Under the modernisation schemes of the Egyptian ruler, Mohammed Ali Pasha, Italian immigration was encouraged in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The city of Alexandria, known as the Bride of the Mediterranean, served as both setting and protagonist for the cosmopolitan Italian community. The Italians had an advantageous economic, political and legal position as Ottoman and European commercial interests coalesced in the vibrant Mediterranean port. Among other foreign groups, the Italians were the second largest in Alexandria. Using census records, newspapers, court records, and consular letters, my paper will discuss the Italian diaspora and its demographic, economic and legal impact on the city of Alexandria in the nineteenth century.
Black Internationalism and Cosmopolitan London in the 1930s and 1940s
Marc Matera (Northern Arizona University)
My paper comes from the manuscript for a book entitled London and the Rise of Black Internationalism. A global city and the capital of the far-flung British Empire, London became the frontline in the black struggle against British imperialism and racism during the 1930s. Caribbean and African intellectuals, university students, artists and activists in London formed organisations that became homes away from home, centres of cultural and intellectual exchange, and new means of voicing social commentary and political dissent. Through them, they influenced the political imagination of British colonial officials, politicians, and others interested in Africa and the colonies, contributing to the major fluctuations in colonial policy in the final decades of imperial rule. Many Caribbean and African men and women embraced black internationalism as an expression of the spirit of the age and a necessary counter to the resurgence of virulent nationalisms and the potential internationalisation of imperialism for the first time within the city’s cosmopolitan environs. From the West African Student’s Union in Camden Town to cramped apartments in Euston and Hampstead, from the university seminar to Soho’s nightclubs, London played a central role in the development of black internationalism because of the conversations, alliances, and boundary crossings which only the metropole made possible. This history transforms our understanding of the development of anticolonialism as well as the cultural landscape of late imperial London.
