Chapter 13 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of nineteenth-century imperialism in all of its forms. It shows how imperial rivalries between London, Paris, and Washington DC, the three most “liberal” capitals on Earth, led imperialists to invest in “gun cities,” where arms manufacturers used coal-fueled technologies to produce new guns, cannons, and battleships that ended the “Age of Parity” between the gunpowder empires of Afro-Eurasia. The city of Calcutta served as the pivot-point of the new era of European dominance, serving as headquarters of the British conquest of India, and later as key port to undermine the power of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing by means of shipments of opium into Guangzhou (Canton) that resulted in European “concessions” in key ports of East Asia. The chapter also demonstrates how the settler colonial conquest of the Americas relied upon and resulted in the proliferation of new cities across the continent. Finally it shows how the imperial Scramble for Africa relied on all of these city-enabled techniques. In most cases, European imperial officials deemed some form of segregation by “race” crucial to the effectiveness of their urban weapons of conquest and imperial rule.

This chapter considers the parallel crises that convulsed the British Raj and the Qing Dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century, and that radically reconstituted international orders in both South and East Asia. The chapter proceeds in five sections. The first section presents a comparative overview of the British Raj and the Qing Empire in c. 1820. The second section then outlines the commercial and ideational pressures that propelled an attempted transformation of the EIC’s mode of rule in India, as well as stoking British commercial and military expansion into Qing-dominated East Asia. The third and fourth sections then explore liberalism’s corrosive impact on both the British Raj and the Qing Empire, detailing the crises that nearly destroyed both empires in the mid-nineteeth century. The fifth section concludes with a comparative examination of international orders in South and East Asia after 1860. The mid-century crises of empire that the chapter examines put paid to British attempts to coercively ‘civilize’ Asian polities for a generation, locking in conservative and incorporative diversity regimes that sustained the Raj and the Qing Dynasty down to their destruction in the twentieth century.

The extraction of wealth from British colonial territories would be justified by the ingenious combination of ideas about improvement and chattel slavery. While the establishment of the Atlantic settlements was an affair of colonial companies and private proprietors, they were gradually taken into direct government by Westminster. But the conflict between settlers’ defence of their autonomy under the theory of the ancient rights of Englishmen and metropolitan sovereignty would eventually push the settlements into statehood – a result that could be understood to open a wholly new global commercial order. By contrast, the East India Company continued to operate as a lucrative, though diminishing source for private enrichment until crown sovereignty was given formal imprimatur in 1813. Not keen to expand Britain’s administrative duties across the world, British lawyers and political leaders would reimagine their empire in terms of occasional interventions to protect private investments and to enforce the system of international rules they held valid all over the world.

The Second Opium War consisted of two interventions in 1858 and 1860. The first campaign resulted from disputed Anglo- French trading rights in China. Although opium importing into China triggered the controversy, commercial access more generally was at stake. A joint military expedition fought its way up the Peiho River to Tientsin where in a treaty (1858) the Chinese met British and French demands. Implementation proved difficult, however, especially when the Chinese imprisoned foreign diplomats and others. A second expedition, consisting of about 17,000 French, British and Indian army soldiers backed up by the Royal Navy, followed two years later and pushed to and up the Peiho River and on to Beijing. The expeditionary force reached Beijing quickly and secured the allies’ demands. They avoided unduly weakening the imperial government, since only stable government could uphold their trading rights. The campaigns will be examined in new ways, concentrating on the co-ordination of three distinctive armies, logistics, and the Indian army’s role. The war’s most controversial episode - the burning of the imperial summer palace at the campaign’s end - will be re-examined in relation to: the conduct of the war, its contemporary and later impact, and the emblematic use of such destructive acts in ‘colonial’ campaigning.