Mehul Srivastava London
BACK when London was the capital of a third of the planet, the young sailor in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness looked on the serpentine Thames and conjured up what England sent forth into the world.
“The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires,” wrote Conrad in 1899.
It’s a different sort of empire now. As the vast realm crumbled around London, scattered by the “wind of change” that then prime minister Harold Macmillan perceived in a 1960 speech in South Africa, the capital expanded its dominion of finance and left the rest of a dissatisfied nation behind.
So as Scotland votes on whether to undo 307 years of union with England, London is both villain and victim. It’s a city reduced to the sum total of its excess, growing in global influence and yet capital of a Britain that would no longer be so great were the Scots to exit.
“Since the end of empire, London has flourished while much of the rest of the UK has suffered serious decline,” said Alex von Tunzelmann, the author of Indian Summer, which chronicled the last days of London’s grasp over the subcontinent. “There is a great deal of resentment about this, and not just in Scotland.”
The transformation took time. By the 1990s, after an ellipsis marked by industrial decline, race riots and nationwide strikes, London was back, riding a wave of Cool Britannia. For the second cities of the UK, once enriched by the mercantilism at the heart of colonial trade, the evolution proved elusive.
“Most of the cities which built fortunes on imperial trade and industry – Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow – have not matched London’s growth,” said Von Tunzelmann.
As such, “much of the UK justifiably regards London as unfairly privileged”.
It was a sharp turn of history. About the same time Conrad was writing, Bram Stoker gave a face to popular fears of what might lurk in far-flung lands, waiting to feed on the bounty of the capital. “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is,” Count Dracula told his solicitor, Jonathan Harker.
The Scottish nationalists’ narrative is that of London as disinterested overseer, having shrunk from what Salman Rushdie in the Satanic Verses described as the “capital of vilayat” (foreign) for the once-colonised, to the capital of the shrivelled Great Britain.
At stake is London’s relationship to what remains: Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and those scattered appendages of past glory, the 14 British Overseas Territories, which replicated and improved on the financial secrecy of the City to become outposts of London’s empire of money.
Bloated with the talented young and the moneyed old, London, at least in the measurable currency of investment and capital, is impervious to the departure of Scotland.
“London’s power is also from other metrics, like the concentration of state-funded institutions, or the diversity of its population,” said Richard Bell, a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “London will continue to hold a special place in the global imagination, even though it may be modestly diminished economically.”
In fact, the loss would inflate London’s economic dominance, said Tristram Hunt, author of Ten Cities That Made an Empire. Scotland contributes 9 percent of the UK economy.
“London’s been too powerful since the 16th century,” he said. If the referendum succeeded, London could be “transformed into what some people want to see as a Hong Kong-style city- state off the coast of northern Europe”. What would be lost, Hunt said, was the sense of shared history between the Scots and the English.
Felix Driver, a co-editor of Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, said Scotland had its own place of privilege in England’s empire. “For all the calls for independence and freedom, Scotland is not a colony… and Glasgow flourished at the same time as London did, nicknamed during the Victorian and Edwardian periods as the second city of empire.
“The way Glasgow is, if you wrote empire out of the story, you really wouldn’t be able to understand much at all,” said Driver. – Bloomberg