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Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Susan M. Neild
Susan M. Neild
Affiliation:
Rochester, New York
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Extract

The colonial port cities of Asia have recently attracted renewed attention not only from students of European imperial expansion, but also from others concerned with urban growth and change. These cities, founded by Europeans or developed by them as central links in worldwide colonial political and economic networks, stood apart from precolonial urban centers. Their foreign origins or control, their coastal locations, their central positions within European colonial systems, their emphasis on commercial rather than ritual activities, and their ethnic and cultural heterogeneity are important features which distinguish them from most indigenous cities in Asia. Many possessed a dual social and spatial structure, furthermore, which contrasted with the more unitary and often ritualized order of the noncolonial centers. Products of a changing political world order, these colonial cities became recognized centers of change in their own societies.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , April 1979 , pp. 217 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAS Pacific Coast Annual Meeting in June 1974. Funds for my research were provided by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program.

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