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DOI: 10.1177/0096144202250383

2003 29: 257Journal of Urban HistoryCarl H. Nightingale

A Tale Of Three Global Ghettos : How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History

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10.1177/0096144202250383JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS

A TALE OF THREE GLOBAL GHETTOSHow Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize

U.S. Urban History

CARL H. NIGHTINGALEUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst

The word ghetto has been used with increasing currency worldwide. American urban historians have yet toaddress the questions that arise from the question of whether ghetto is an appropriate term for urban segrega-tion outside the United States. Arnold Hirsch’s division of the history of American ghettos into three periodsoffers a useful scheme to begin deepening conceptions of the global dynamics of racial segregation. It giveshistorical depth to efforts under way in the social sciences to understand such dynamics by portraying ghet-tos as dynamic phenomena that change in tune with the complex contingencies of local, national, and globalpolitical conflicts. In particular, the story of the three ghettos coincides well with critical changes in the di-rection of twentieth-century global political conflicts over the shape of the world economy and the meaningsof race.

Keywords: ghetto; racial segregation; urban theory; global politics; white supremacy

The word ghetto, just like everything else these days, has gone global. Or, tobe more historically accurate, it always has been quite a worldly word, but nowit has become a truly flamboyant border-and-ocean crosser. Etymologistsstraining to locate its earliest origins scoured sources in Venice, Germany, andthe Middle East, and they even listed the Latin word for Egypt as one of theirsuspects.1 Historians tracing the early-modern practice of ghetto making tra-versed the European Jewish diaspora from Portugal to the Pale, and their col-leagues in the twentieth century have wrestled with the horrors of Lodz,Warsaw, Riga, and the ghetto’s role as the staging ground for mass killing. Bythe 1920s, the word had taken its biggest geographical leap yet, across theAtlantic Ocean, where Chicago school sociologists multiplied its meaningspromiscuously, using it to refer to any community they deemed self-contained,whether primarily the home of Jews, Poles, Italians, Mexicans, Chinese, orAfrican Americans.2 Then, sometime during the twenty years after that, ghettobecame more specific again—at least in one respect—taking on its most com-mon contemporary verbal companion, black.

In the past thirty-odd years, ghetto, still associated heavily with AfricanAmericans, has become a real jet-setter, but as it crisscrosses the global village

257

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 29 No. 3, March 2003 257-271DOI: 10.1177/0096144202250383© 2003 Sage Publications


with ever greater abandon, its meanings have proliferated profusely. Ghettohas used many conveyances in its planetary travels, but three are most impor-tant: politics, popular culture, and social science. Politics, because for theworld’s New Right movements, from Scandinavia to South Africa to theAntipodes, ghetto has become the mother of all racial code words, easilypaired in any language with riot, crime, underclass, welfare dependency, andother means to rally white “swing voters” rightward by sounding alarms aboutthe mortal dangers posed by the unrestrained power of society’s outcasts andtheir advocates. The idea that Europe’s cities are “Americanizing” as much asits movie theaters and its fast cuisine has raised still other possibilities formongering moral panic. For their part, left-of-center parties have oftenresponded in a similarly demagogic manner to woo their working-class con-stituents back. However, in Europe and elsewhere, their alarms also sometimesfocus on “ghettos” as evidence of a need for ever-more encompassing welfarestates.

The engines of mass culture, meanwhile, have beamed a typically kaleido-scopic version of ghettos throughout the airwaves of the global village. Apoca-lyptic projections dominate to be sure, helped along by international newsreports of tourist murders in Miami or “Devils’ Night” fires in Detroit or, per-haps most resonantly, Jimmy Carter’s 1978 pilgrimage to the South Bronx. Butin the hands of global hip hop—which includes groups ranging from Hous-ton’s Geto Boys to Toronto’s Ghetto Concept and has produced albums rang-ing from Ghetto Moudjahidin, of the group Ness & Cité from Le Havre,France, to Ghetto Code of Johannesburg’s Prophets of Da City—ghetto hasalso become a term of pride and envy, a word to “represent” with braggadocio,a means for “ghetto” residents the world over to capitalize on their neighbor-hood’s urban edginess through the symbolic alchemy of what Robin D. G.Kelley calls “ghettocentricty.” A kind of international solidarity could also befound, for example, in the rhymes of O Rappa, a hip hop group inspired byBlack Power from the Baixada Fluminense favelas near Rio de Janeiro. “Tudo,tudo, tudo, igual,” they proclaim (All, all, all the same), “Brixton, Bronx, ouBaixada.”3

Social scientists have scurried to contain the fallout caused by ghetto’sworld travels and the explosion of connotations that now ricochet off the sur-face of what was once a neutral-enough concept. “This is a lot like the Bronx,isn’t it?” a kid from the shantytown Villa Paraíso near Buenos Aires askedsociologist Javier Auyero.4 During the 1990s, a whole academic industrysprouted up asking basically the same thing, complete with a flurry of interna-tional scholarly conferences, not to mention a small fortune in EuropeanUnion funding. Was it possible that London’s Brixton, Paris’s La Courneuve,Munich’s Hasenbergl, Stockholm’s Rinkeby, Sydney’s Redfern, Johannes-burg’s Hillbrow, Nairobi’s River Road, São Paulo’s Zona Leste, Mexico City’sNezahualcóyotl, and Toronto’s Jane/Finch were all ghettos?5

258 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / March 2003


In answering such questions, sociologists, geographers, and urban theoristshave employed increasingly sophisticated methodologies and theoreticalapparatuses. At first, comparative analysis was an excuse to define—withwhat seemed ever-diminishing complexity—exactly what a ghetto was andwhat it was not. Crime rates, “underclass indicators,” segregation indices, andWilliam Julius Wilson’s “concentration effects” were measured, and Chi-cago’s were held up next to paler but intensifying imitations from Hamburg orBirmingham. Pointed fights broke out about the relationship between “ghetto”and “slum,” as well as over the precise physiognomy of some newly discoveredcreatures—”hyperghettos,” “outcast ghettos,” “enclaves,” and “citadels.”More recently, though, the quest has been for some bigger global “process”that itself might be tied to segregating inegalitarian tendencies in cities. Onecandidate for that process is a version of the one outlined in Saskia Sassen’sThe Global City, involving supposed increases in urban inequality brought onby the concentration of corporate command-and-control centers in a few citiesand the vast new waves of low-wage immigrant labor such cities attract. Won-dering whether “globalization” had created a “New Spatial Order” in cities,Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen gathered geographers and plannersfrom around the world—including researchers interested in “ghettos” in suchseemingly unlikely locations as Calcutta, Singapore, and Tokyo—and decidedultimately that, while cities contained plenty of new segregation, inequality,and exclusion, they were tied in simply too many diverse ways to the worldeconomy to merit any unified classification. Sako Musterd and Wim Ostendorflikewise pulled together an international cast of social scientists—all from theAtlantic world in their case—to come up with only slightly less lukewarm con-clusions about the impact of changing (usually receding) welfare states on seg-regation in cities.6

What’s a historian to say? We ourselves have been largely, perhaps volun-tarily, “segregated” from these debates, and historians of American cities—where, everyone agrees, real ghettos were born—have been most conspicu-ously absent. This is not merely because (as some who promote projects tointernationalize American history have suggested) American historians ingeneral see the rest of the world as a blur and prefer less exotic locations suchas Pittsburgh for our conventions—nor is it solely because we are not up tospeed yet on our French or our Bengali. It also has to do with the academic fun-damentals of method and analysis. American urban history continues to focusresolutely on the local. The field’s bread and butter continues to be the casestudy, despite some internal hand-wringing about that fact and despite a fewfine national syntheses that have sought to redress it.

There is no doubt that exploring the kinds of questions that arise from theglobalization of ghetto-talk would require U.S. urban historians to stretch theirmethods. In my own look into these matters over the past few years, I felt it nec-essary to school myself in the work of world historians—in particular, theirchallenges to traditional comparative analysis and their growing interest in the

Nightingale / THREE GLOBAL GHETTOS 259


global connections between different parts of the world, including cities. Ihave been particularly attracted to the idea that such international connectionsor “flows”—typically thought of in terms of money, things, ideas, and peo-ple—must be analyzed in the context of networks of global power and conflictsover global power, including those of states, international institutions, andefforts of political mobilization on the elite or grassroots levels that have aglobal scope. I have also supplemented this analytical retooling with someattention to the work of self-described “heterodox” international economistswho, largely outside the purview of historians, have conducted lively and illu-minating debates about the nature of “globalization,” often focusing on itspolitical driving forces—most important, on the global scope of“redistributional conflicts” between corporate employers, workers, andnation-states.7 A little nearer to history, racial theory, too, has proven a richground for exploration. It has recently revived a long tradition of examiningboth the political and the planetary dimensions of the color line, particularlythe global struggles between white supremacy and racial egalitarianism andthe worldwide reach of institutionalized white privilege.8 Many of theseinsights are nearly or completely absent from the work of social scientists andurban theorists who have been at the forefront of contemplating the globalnature of urban segregation and “ghettos.”

None of these travels into other fields would come to any good end, though,without relying on the best accomplishments of urban history, particularlyurban historians’ deeply complex idea of the American ghetto itself. Thefield’s attention to the contingency and variability of change, to the role ofpolitical conflict as well as impersonal “processes” in explaining thosechanges, provides an indispensable antidote to the totalizing, impersonal, andsometimes even mechanistic explanations offered by urban theorists. Even thelocal orientation produces critical insights since global political struggles overclass and race issues all take place on innumerable and various local battle-fields, and the battlefields of urban politics are some of the most important.Indeed, the sense that ghettos cannot be seen as solely phenomena of class orrace but a manifestation of their inextricable interchange was an idea hashedout earlier and in much greater depth in urban history than in social scientificwriting on ghettos (gender issues remain too much on the sidelines in bothfields, however). Finally, and for my purposes here most importantly, histori-ans’ focus on the past helps us refute social scientists’ tendency to date all dra-matic historic transformations to the past thirty years.

In a more integrated and multidisciplinary effort to understand the globalcontexts of ghettos, the work of American urban historians to this point wouldbe most helpful in pressing questions of chronology, periodization, and thelonger durée. In this respect, the work of Arnold Hirsch is especially indis-pensable. The chronological arguments he put forth in Making the SecondGhetto—as well as those he elaborated on in the context of the entire centuryand the whole urban United States in his 1993 article “With or Without Jim



Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United States”—explode the ideaof “the” singular ghetto. Rather, Hirsch tells us, ghettos were built, unbuilt, andrebuilt on three different broad patterns in three different periods of the twenti-eth century. Different demographic dynamics and, above all, different enginesof segregation operated in each. His choice of periods in particular reflects thetiming of the U.S. federal government’s assumption of a central role in segre-gating cities. He dates the “first ghetto” from 1880 to 1933, when segregationintensified mostly without assistance from the government. From 1933 to1968, the period of the “second ghetto,” a brace of federal agencies “exhorted”segregation by literally paving the way for white flight, leveling most firstghettos through “urban renewal,” and pushing African Americans beyond theperipheries of downtown, many of them into grim public housing projects.Two decades of open housing activism and five years of fiery rebellions in thestreets culminated in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, making housing discrimi-nation illegal and opening a third chapter of ghetto history, which, as best asanyone can tell, is still with us.9

There are always reasons to criticize periodization schemes. Most histori-ans of “first ghettos” would argue that 1880 is too early a starting point. Thetwo World Wars fell smack in the middle of Hirsch’s periods, arguably mini-mizing their role in the story. His notion of a third ghetto is especially undevel-oped, focusing mostly on the suburbanization of middle-class AfricanAmericans. His story accounts little for the economic history of ghettos, eventhough ghettos’relative economic marginality is as critical an attribute as theirsegregation (as well as being intertwined with it). The process ofdeindustrialization, for example, which is thought by many to be a criticalaspect of the ghetto economy, at least straddles the second and third periods.Other continuities may, of course, be obscured, as well as diversity amongghettos at any given time and changes within periods. Some may object thatassigning numbers to ghettos gives a falsely objective ring to our categories.

In the end, though, I stand by Arnold Hirsch’s tale of three ghettos. His shortexposition of the tale in a short article obviously leaves a lot out, but the basicideas remain flexible and richly developable. Thinking of ghettos as the prod-uct of a series of transformations that span the century not only challengessocial scientists’ mind-numbing search for “ideal-types.” The numbering sys-tem also frees us from narratives of ghetto history based on monodirectionaldirectional change such as “the origins of the urban crisis,” “the rise of theunderclass,” or “the process of hyperghettoization,” all of which end with ghet-tos worse off as time goes on, thus implying a problematic “Golden Age” in anearlier period. It also allows us to think about many layers of experience atonce and thus to imagine that moments of ambiguous promise can coexistamid less hopeful developments. By establishing the civil rights movement’svictories in the late sixties as a turning point, it also signals that ghettos are theproducts of change from below, not just from above—or, more accurately, thatghetto residents are capable of making some, if not all, of their own history.



Political conflict—with all its indeterminacy, ambiguity, contingency, andunpredictability—is a driving force in the periodization scheme. And, it turnsout, the three ghettos not only shed helpful light on racial politics, but they alsocoincide reasonably well with big turning points in class politics. All of theseattributes, it turns out, make the three ghettos an ideal chronological backbonefor the internationalization of ghetto history.

What follows is a highly condensed version of the tale of three global ghet-tos that I developed as part of a larger project on this theme. It depends heavilyon Arnold Hirsch’s original periodization scheme. A schematic outline of thistale is included in Table 1.10

Since their origins, U.S. ghettos have been fundamentally immersed in andhave in many ways participated in the outcomes of a century of world-spanningpolitical conflicts. Of these conflicts, two are most important. The firstinvolves conflicts between mobilized political forces of global capital andfinance that promote inequalities in the world economy against more egalitar-ian movements, such as the labor movement and middle-class reformers. Thesecond involves conflicts within the politics of race: those who seek to extendracial privileges for whites oppose resistance movements inspired by visionsof racial equality against colonialism, segregation, and other institutionalizedinjustices linked to color or culture.

The “first” ghettos came into being most often near the downtowns ofAmerican cities during the first third of the twentieth century. During thisperiod, western corporate and financial power, riding the wide influence ofnineteenth-century “classic” liberalism and free trade rhetoric, battled laborand middle-class social reform movements across the world with greater orlesser success in different national contexts. In the United States, during WorldWar I, with the decline of immigration from Europe, some older patternschanged temporarily: industry opened up for the first time to African Ameri-cans, stimulating a “great migration” from the rural and urban South. After thewar, though, old patterns of employment discrimination hardened, and capitalsuccessfully fought back against the labor movement and co-opted many “pro-gressive” reforms. Most American ghettos thus first came into being just aseconomic inequalities reached new heights during the 1920s.

White supremacy sustained its global influence during this period too, asformal empires and systems of segregation solidified across the world. Impe-rial and national authorities on almost all continents began the task of segregat-ing cities by equating urban problems such as “vice,” crime, disease, and socialunrest with blacks and other people of color and suggesting urban division as ameans to solve those problems. In the United States, this global “racial urban-ism” informed the actions of the white homeowners, realtors, and banks thattransformed an urban landscape marked by scattered minority-black enclavesinto one of the large-scale segregated majority-black communities we know asghettos.11 These first ghettos were also marked by the founding of separateblack-run institutions that served their residents. It also coincided with the



TAB

LE 1

Per

iodi

zing

U.S

.Ghe

ttos

in G

loba

l Con

text

Firs

t Ghe

ttoS

econ

d G

hetto

Third

Ghe

tto(A

ppro

xim

atel

y 19

00-1

933)

(App

roxi

mat

ely

1933

-196

8)(A

ppro

xim

atel

y 19

68-?

)

Mom

entu

m in

glo

bal p

oliti

cs:

Wor

ld e

cono

my

Cla

ssic

libe

ralis

mW

elfa

re s

tate

Key

nesi

anis

mN

eolib

eral

ism

Rac

ial p

oliti

csC

lass

ic w

hite

sup

rem

acy

Rac

ism

bui

lt in

to w

elfa

re s

tate

but

Neo

raci

smin

crea

sing

ly c

halle

nged

Ghe

tto r

esis

tanc

eIn

depe

nden

t bla

ck in

stitu

tions

;mod

ern

Ele

ctor

al s

tren

gth

of g

hetto

s;ci

vil r

ight

sB

lack

may

ors;

ebb

in u

rban

pow

erci

vil r

ight

s m

ovem

ent b

egin

svi

ctor

ies

in 1

964-

1968

vis-

à-vi

s su

burb

s;ne

w r

esis

tanc

eN

atio

nal t

rend

s in

wea

lthR

eleg

atio

n of

bla

cks

to s

ervi

ce jo

bs,

Dei

ndus

tria

lizat

ion

begi

ns, b

ut b

ecau

seIn

dust

rial f

light

in m

any

citie

s;at

tack

on

and

inco

me

ineq

ualit

y,al

levi

ated

dur

ing

Wor

ld W

ar I;

low

of la

bor

mov

emen

t str

engt

h, g

row

thla

bor

mov

emen

t;w

ages

dec

reas

e,jo

b m

arke

tsw

ages

, hig

h po

vert

y, a

nd v

ery

high

yiel

ds w

age

incr

ease

s an

d de

crea

ses

pove

rty

pers

ists

, and

ineq

ualit

yin

equa

lity

in p

over

ty, i

nequ

ality

incr

ease

s de

spite

gro

wth

Hig

hlig

hts

ofE

mpl

oym

ent d

iscr

imin

atio

n, s

omew

hat

Add

ition

of r

acia

lly s

egre

gate

d w

elfa

reA

ttack

s on

effo

rts

to a

llevi

ate

raci

alin

stitu

tiona

lized

alle

viat

ed in

Wor

ld W

ar I;

incr

easi

ngst

ate

1960

s:ci

vil r

ight

s ac

ts v

ersu

sin

equa

litie

s;ra

ce-c

oded

atta

cks

onw

hite

priv

ilege

hous

ing

disc

rimin

atio

nra

cial

dis

crim

inat

ion

wel

fare

, crim

e;di

scrim

inat

ion

expa

nds

in c

rimin

al ju

stic

eD

ynam

ics

of u

rban

Dis

crim

inat

ion

in p

rivat

e re

al e

stat

eD

urin

g 19

30s-

1960

s, h

uge

inte

rven

tion

ofW

elfa

re s

tate

less

act

ive

in s

usta

inin

gre

side

ntia

lm

arke

ts:r

acia

l ste

erin

g, b

lock

bust

ing,

stat

e on

beh

alf o

f seg

rega

tion:

Hom

e O

wne

r’sse

greg

atio

n;do

mes

tic s

ecur

ity s

tate

segr

egat

ion

rest

rictiv

e co

vena

nts,

mob

vio

lenc

e;O

wne

r’s L

oan

Cor

pora

tion,

Fed

eral

Hou

sing

take

s a

big

role

;priv

ate

stat

e ro

le li

mite

d to

cou

rts,

pol

ice

Adm

inis

tratio

n po

licie

s, fe

dera

l san

ctio

n to

disc

rimin

atio

n pe

rsis

tsre

dlin

ing,

raci

ally

dis

crim

inat

ory

publ

ic h

ousi

ng,

urba

n re

new

al, a

nd tr

ansp

ort p

olic

ies

Tren

ds in

spa

tial

Incr

easi

ng s

egre

gatio

n;cr

eatio

n of

Hig

hest

seg

rega

tion

indi

ces

reac

hed

inB

arel

y de

crea

sing

indi

ces;

gent

rific

a-se

greg

atio

nla

rge,

con

tiguo

us m

ajor

ity-b

lack

1950

s an

d 19

60s

tion

pres

sure

s;su

burb

aniz

atio

n of

raci

al g

hetto

sse

greg

atio

n;in

crea

sing

seg

rega

tion

by c

lass

with

in g

hetto

s;co

mpl

icat

ion

of u

rban

col

or li

nes;

mili

tariz

atio

n of

urba

n sp

ace

(con

tinue

d)

263


264

TAB

LE

1 (c

onti

nued

)

Firs

t Ghe

ttoS

econ

d G

hetto

Third

Ghe

tto(A

ppro

xim

atel

y 19

00-1

933)

(App

roxi

mat

ely

1933

-196

8)(A

ppro

xim

atel

y 19

68-?

)

Geo

grap

hic

loca

tion

Nea

r do

wnt

own;

ofte

n in

“vi

ce”

Exp

ansi

on in

to la

rge

area

s of

city

;des

truc

tion

Exp

ansi

on o

f ghe

ttos

with

in m

any

dist

ricts

;den

sely

pop

ulat

ed;c

lass

of h

isto

ric g

hetto

s an

d re

mov

al to

per

iphe

ryci

ties,

thou

gh le

ss d

ense

;seg

rega

ted

segr

egat

ion

with

in g

hetto

sof

dow

ntow

n;in

stitu

tiona

l cor

dons

san

itaire

sbl

ack

dist

ricts

gro

w in

sub

urbs

;be

twee

n do

wnt

own

and

ghet

topr

ison

s as

ann

exes

to g

hetto

sD

emog

raph

ic c

onte

xts

Firs

t Gre

at M

igra

tion,

esp

ecia

llyS

econ

d G

reat

Mig

ratio

n, e

spec

ially

“New

”im

mig

ratio

n, e

spec

ially

from

1915

-192

019

41-1

968

Latin

Am

eric

a, A

sia


beginnings of resistance to housing and employment discrimination, includinga successful campaign against legalized residential segregation.

The “second” ghetto of the middle third of the twentieth century wasmarked by a series of changes in the direction of worldwide conflicts over eco-nomic and racial equality. The moderately declining economic inequalities ofthat period reflect the waning of classic liberalism during and after the globalgreat depression, as well as the rise in power of labor movements and otherreformist liberal initiatives such as western welfare states and the KeynesianBretton Woods regime for the world economy. Black poverty declined dramat-ically during the 1960s under the auspices of this reformist regime, even ifblack unemployment continued to be higher than that of whites, reflectingboth persistent racial discrimination and the beginnings of capital flight fromcities that would later be called deindustrialization. During the 1930s and1940s, however, white supremacy continued its reign despite insurgent anti-colonial and civil rights movements, and it was successful in putting its stampon U.S. federal housing policies and other aspects of the welfare state, thus cre-ating new institutions of white privilege. Against the backdrop of a renewedmigration from the South, the New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation(HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) instituted highly dis-criminatory housing policies. These were aggravated by similarly raciallybiased urban renewal, public housing, and transportation policies, which notonly solidified the boundaries of ghettos but also pushed them outward fromdowntown. Inspired by anti-colonial forces across the world (and also givingthose movements inspiration), the American black liberation movement man-aged to whittle away some at this edifice by 1968. Combined with some prog-ress against poverty and economic inequality, the late sixties marked a periodof substantial, if fragile, promise for ghetto residents as well as people of coloracross the world.

The third period of ghetto formation encompasses the years since the civilrights movement, when corporate and financial power remobilized itself underthe banner of free markets and the organized defense of white privilege alsoresurged. Both of these political offensives have once again turned the tide inglobal politics, rolling back the hard-won if vulnerable victories for economicand racial equality of the mid-century.

The first of the contemporary inegalitarian political offensives, theneoliberal offensive, has promoted vast new expansions of multinational cor-porate power over the world economy by resuscitating the classic liberal rheto-ric of “free markets.” This global political movement has achieved substantialsuccesses by operating simultaneously on four different fronts. First, its intel-lectual leaders have vigorously promoted neoliberal ideas in universities, gov-ernments, corporations, media networks, and other crucial institutions acrossthe world. Second, deregulated financial markets, unaccountable centralbanks, and one-dollar-one-vote international credit organizations such as theInternational Monetary Fund and World Bank have achieved enormous



powers over national governments, forcing them above all to cut back onspending, taxation, and regulation. Third, those national governments (partic-ularly the nation-states of the English-speaking world, with the U.S. federalgovernment in the lead) have taken their own steps to diminish their welfarepolicies and their regulation of corporations. Instead, they have actively priori-tized and promoted corporate interests, and they have empowered agenciessuch as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World TradeOrganization to enhance the possibility of new victories of this sort. And,fourth, giant multinational companies themselves have vastly expanded theirown political clout within governments, international institutions, communi-ties, ethnic networks, and workplaces, in the process waging war on laborunions and local government regulations and doing whatever they can do tosuppress their obligations to society, including, above all, wages, regulations,and taxes. As part of these broader aims, they have employed new communica-tions technologies, plant closings, “postfordist” productions systems, and thecapacity to move capital, facilities, and assembly lines across the globe as criti-cal assets, but we must remember that such behaviors—often summed up byterms such as globalization and deindustrialization—are not an completeinventory of their weapons of power.

The second of today’s victorious inegalitarian global political offensivesoperates within the politics of race, and I call it the neoracist offensive. Its mis-sion is to preserve and expand institutions and practices that guarantee a wholerange of privileges for whites and to do so without seeming to be “racist.” Theinstitutions and practices of white privilege, which evolved over the past fivehundred years of European expansion, have survived in new forms, despite thedismantling of formal Western imperialist and segregationist regimes. Theracial segregation of American ghettos is one of the most obvious results oftheir work, but they operate across society—in job, housing, and investmentmarkets; in the provision of social, educational, health, and transportation ser-vices; in the law and the forces of social control; in access to representativeinstitutions; and in the management of the environment. In all of the world’ssocieties dominated by people of European descent, leaders of the movementto preserve such avenues of white privilege have built powerful, nearly all-white New Right electoral coalitions. The various components of this transna-tional neoracist movement are more loosely connected than those of theneoliberal corporate movement, and they reflect the many different racial ide-ologies that operate in different national cultures. But they share numerouscharacteristics. All of them usually avoid outright expressions of whitesupremacy in their campaigns, all adamantly deny the existence of institution-alized racial inequality, and all insist on portraying whites as victims of racialinjustice. At the same time, all rely on deceptive code words—including theword ghetto—to keep the stereotypes and racial hierarchies of classic whitesupremacy alive. And all appeal to high ideals of national preservation oreven equality itself to camouflage their own defense of institutional racial



inequality. In this task, the United States New Right’s racial politics has beenvery influential across the world. It has had much political success by cloakingits “wars” against affirmative action, anti-discrimination agencies, civil rightslaw in general, welfare recipients, immigrants, the homeless, drug sellers andusers, and criminals—as well as the draconian and racially discriminatorymeasures of control and punishment that accompany those campaigns—asvirtuous, color-blind, racial “egalitarianism.”

Residents of the third ghetto, especially the poor, have suffered much fromthe combined efforts of neoliberals and neoracists. As regulation of the worldeconomy has weakened, following “free-market” doctrine, the three mostimportant economic pipelines that distribute income and wealth to the poorwithin advanced societies have eroded: the pipeline of wage work, the pipelineof government benefits, and even the pipeline of credit and homeownership.As a result, most of the relatively positive economic trends that materializedduring the middle third of the twentieth century have reversed themselves. Thewealthy “global North” grew at the expense of the poorer “global South,” andinequality soared within most of the world’s national economies as wagesstagnated or fell. Economic booms during the past thirty years have done lessthan their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s to decrease joblessness andpoverty such as that concentrated in ghettos, and then only late during periodsof expansion—or, as in the late 1990s in the United States, during a tenuousspeculative “bubble.” Meanwhile, neoracist rhetoric has removed any mentionof institutionalized racial inequality from mainstream public debate, and thegap between white and black income and wealth has persisted. Residentialsegregation by color has also persisted in the United States and expanded to thesuburbs. Segregation by class within black communities has increased. In theUnited States, enforcement of anti-discrimination laws weakened, city gov-ernments (many run by people of color) lost power on the national stage to thesuburbs, police abuse continued, racial and class divisions in urban space weremore heavily militarized, and a giant effort to expand the American prison sys-tem, lavishly employing neoracist rhetoric, resulted in the incarceration ofnearly a whole generation of young ghetto residents.

None of this meant that American ghetto residents or their compatriots else-where in the world have disappeared from the scene of world history. Not onlyhave they played a central role in creating global culture, especially the youth-ful culture of hip hop, but they have also begun to have a new impact on theshape of global political conflicts. Undoubtedly, the anti-colonial, civil rights,and labor movements have seen their power decline overall since the late1960s as their internal ties, their international connections, and the egalitariancommitment of too many of their leaders eroded. But under the leadership ofthousands of creative neighborhood organizers and cultural activists—andallied to some degree with a new generation of labor, student, environmental,and women’s activists—they have sustained what they could of their socialmovements, changing their tactics over time to meet new challenges. At the



very edge of the new millennium, they have begun to show new life and argu-ably even the beginnings of a new international outlook. Whether theirefforts—combined with the growing popular dissatisfaction with corporatepractices, as well as some signs of a softening of racial rhetoric brought on bythe New Right’s need to court the Latino immigrant vote—signal the begin-nings of a more promising fourth ghetto remains an unclear but invitingprospect.

There is no doubt much in that story to debate, modify, amplify, and ulti-mately rearrange. But a tale something like it is necessary if we are to evenbegin confronting the questions posed by the globalization of the ghetto con-cept. It opens up a different way to ask and answer whether “ghettos” haveappeared across the world. What are the connections as well as the similaritiesand differences between urban places across the world that face combinationsof geographic segregation by color, class, or gender; relative impoverishment;political marginality; and cultural stigmatization? To what extent have thecomplex outcomes of the same global political conflicts affected those differ-ent places in similar ways? Can we speak of periods of relative convergenceand divergence, and can those political conflicts help us explain such changes?

By pushing social scientists and urban theorists to consider the historicalcontexts and the historical multiplicity of ghettos, we also fruitfully challengeour own paradigms as American urban historians. Cities across the world havealways been split up in unequal ways, and segregation based on some notion ofcolor or race has been present in many places across the world since Europeanimperial conquests and urban settlement began. Just because the U.S. ghettohas become the standard by which to judge such things today should not blindus from the possibility that ghettos themselves evolved from earlier practiceselsewhere in the world.

1. Robert K. Barnhardt, ed., The Barnhardt Dictionary of Etymology (N.p.: H.W. Wilson Co., 1988),430.

2. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1928), 282-3, andsee Robert Park’s “Forward,” vii-viii. Robert E. Park, Edward W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, TheCity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 55-6, 150-1.

3. On ghettocentricity, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black WorkingClass (New York: Free Press, 1994). Ness & Cité, “Ghetto Moudjahidin” on album Ghetto Moudjahidin,DIN Records (Le Havre, France, n.d.); Ghetto Concept, All Stars Da Album, BMG Music (Toronto, 2002);Prophets of Da City, Ghetto Code, Ghetto Ruff Records (Johannesburg, n.d.); O Rappa, “Brixton, Bronx ouBaixada,” on album O Rappa, produced by Fabio Henriques, Warner Music (Brasil, 1994).

4. Javier Auyero, “ ‘This Is a Lot Like the Bronx, Isn’t It?’ Lived Experiences of Marginality in anArgentine Slum,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 (1999): 45-69.

5. Brahim Chanchabi, with Catherine de Withol de Wenden, Cités et Diversités: L’Immigration enEurope (Paris Aidda, 1995); Peter Hall, “The Inner City Worldwide,” in Peter Hall, ed., The Inner City inContext: The Final Report of the Social Sciences Research Council Inner Cities Working Party (London:Heinemann, 1981); John Rex, The Ghetto and Underclass: Essays on Race and Social Policy (Aldershot,



UK: Avebury, 1988); Susan J. Smith, “Residential Segregation and the Politics of Racialization,” inMalcolm Cross and Michael Keith, eds., Racism, the City and the State (London: Routledge Kegan Paul,1993), 128-43; Loic J. D. Wacquant, “The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implica-tions,” Acta Sociologica 39 (1996): 122-39; Wacquant, “Banlieues Françaises et le Ghetto Noir Américain:de l’Amalgame à la Comparaison,” French Politics and Society 10, no. 4 (1992): 81-103; Wacquant, “UrbanOutcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery,” Interna-tional Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, no. 3 (1993): 366-83; Wacquant, “The ComparativeStructure and Experience of Urban Exclusion: ‘Race,’Class, and Space in Chicago and Paris,” in KatherineMcFate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson, eds., Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Pol-icy: Western States and the New World Order (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), 543-70; AdilJazouli, Les Années Banlieues (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 17-63; Hervé Vieillard-Baron, Les BanlieuesFrançaises: ou le Ghetto Impossible (N.p.: Editions de l’Aube, 1994); François Dubet and DidierLapeyronnie, Les Quartiers d’Exil (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992); Sophie Body-Gendrot, “Migration andthe Racialization of the Postmodern City in France,” in Cross and Keith, eds., Racism, the City and the State,77-92; Enzo Mingione, “Urban Poverty in the Advanced Industrial World: Concepts, Analysis andDebates,” in Mingione, ed., Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader, 3-40; Nick Buck, “Social andEconomic Change in Contemporary Britain: The Emergence of an Urban Underclass?” in Mingione, ed.,Urban Poverty, 277-98; Hartmut Häusserman, Andreas Kappha, and Rainer Muenz, “Berlin: Immigration,Social Problems, Political Approaches” (unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium onSocial Exclusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin, June 1996); Hartmut Häussermann, “SocialTransformation of Urban Space in Berlin since 1960” (unpublished paper delivered at the InternationalSymposium on Social Exclusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin, June 1996); Jens S. Dangschatand David Fasenfest, “(Re)Structuring Urban Poverty: The Impact of Globalization on Its Extent and Con-centration” (unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the “NewUrban Underclass,” Berlin, June 1996); Christian Kesteloot, “La Problématique de l’Intégration des JeunesUrbains: Une Analyse Géographique du Cas Bruxellois” (unpublished paper delivered at the InternationalSymposium on Social Exclusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin, June 1996); Sophie Watson,“Work and Leisure in Tomorrow’s Cities,” in Stuart Rees, Gordon Rodley, and Frank Stilwell, eds., Beyondthe Market: Alternatives to Economic Rationalism (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1993), 11-2; see also Mark Peel,“The Urban Debate: From ‘Los Angeles’ to the Urban Village,” in Patrick Troy, ed., Australian Cities:Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia (Hong Kong: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39-40.

6. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1991); Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen, eds., Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000); Sako Musterd and Wim Ostendorf, eds., Urban Segregation and the Wel-fare State: Inequality and Exclusion in Western Cities (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1998).

7. See, for example, James Crotty, Gerald Epstein, and Patricia Kelley, “Multinational Corporations inthe Neo-Liberal Regime,” in Baker, Epstein, and Pollin, eds., Globalization and Progressive Economic Pol-icy, 117-43; David M. Kotz, “The U.S. Economy in the 1990s: A Neo-Liberal Success Story?” (unpublishedpaper in author’s possession); Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, with United for a Fair Economy, EconomicApartheid in America (New York: New Press, 2000); Kavaljit Singh, The Globalization of Finance: A Citi-zens Guide (London: Zed Books, 1999); Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, 2d ed. (CapeTown: IPSR Books, 1998); Robin Hahnel, Panic Rules: Everything You Need to Know about the GlobalEconomy (Cambridge, UK: South End Press, 1999); William K. Tabb: Unequal Partners: A Primer onGlobalization (New York: New Press, 2002); Tabb, The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Strugglefor Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Edward Luttwak,Turbocapitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); SusanStrange, Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Governments (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1999); Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity (London: Verso, 1998); Harry Shutt, The Trou-ble with Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure (London: Zed Books, 1999).Robin Hahnel, “Capitalist Globalism in Crisis: Boom and Bust,” series of five articles in Z Magazine:December 1998, 46-52; January 1999, 51-7; February 1999, 47-54; March 1999, 52-7; and April 1999, 32-9. Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, MAI and the Threat to American Freedom (New York: Stoddart, 1997);Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, 2d ed. (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1997); Hans-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global Trap: Globalization and the Assault on Democracy andProsperity (London: Zed Books, 1997); William Greider, One World: Ready or Not: The Manic Logic ofGlobal Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works andfor Whom (London: Verso, 1997); J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist



Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache, eds.,States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1996); Titus Alexan-der, Unraveling Global Apartheid: An Overview of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996);Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002); Samuel Bowles, David M.Gordon, and Thomas Weissfopf, After the Wasteland: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (Armonk,NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C. Trachte, Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan(Albany: State University Press of New York, 1990); Howard M. Wachtel, The Money Mandarins: TheMaking of a Supranational Economic Order (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Arthur MacEwan and Wil-liam K. Tabb, eds., Instability and Change in the World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989);David M. Gordon, “The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?” New Left Review 68(March-April 1988): 24-65.

8. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the1980s (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1986; 2d ed. 1994); Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory,Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Raceand Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Winant, “The New InternationalDynamics of Race,” Poverty and Race 4 (1995): 1-5. David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, 2d ed.(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Ansley, New Right New Racism: Race andReaction in the United States and Britain (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 49-73; David R.Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso,1991) (see also “Afterword” in the 2d ed., 2000); Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London:Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1995);Ignatiev and John Garvey, Race Traitor (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1996); Grace Elizabeth Hale,Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940) (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Mat-thew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness(New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1999). David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What ItMeans to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African AmericanWomen’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (1992): 251-74; the essays in WahneemaLubiano, The House that Race Built and Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement,ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995);Philip F. Rubio, A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,2001); John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael Wieviorka, L’espace du racisme (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1991),translated into English as The Arena of Racism (London: Sage, 1995); Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fan-tasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul in association withPluto Press [Annandale, New South Wales], 2000); the essays collected and edited by Danièle Joly in Scape-goats and Social Actors: The Exclusion of Minorities in Western and Eastern Europe (Houndmills, UK:MacMillan, 1998); Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thoughtand Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Joe Feagin, Hernàn Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism: The Basics(New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 2001); George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2002); Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American andSouth African History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981); Frederickson, The Black Image in theWhite Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Hanover, NH: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1971); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1996).

9. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; Hirsch,“With or without Jim Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United States,” in Hirsch and Raymond A.Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,1993), 65-99.

10. I have developed this narrative as part of a larger book project tentatively titled The Ghetto in theGlobal Village: U.S. Urban Poverty and Racial Segregation in World-Historical Perspective. This repre-sents an update of my original foray into this field, titled “The Global Inner City: Toward a Historical Analy-sis,” in W. E. B. DuBois, Race and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, ed. Michael B. Katz andThomas J. Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). I have also developed these ideasand my response to urban theorists and social scientists in an unpublished paper called “Are There AnyGhettos in the Global City? (and Other Questions about Urban Theory and World Historical Change).”



11. I have explored some of these topics in a paper in progress, “The World Travels of Racial Urbanism:Urban Racial Segregation as a Global Historical Phenomenon.”

Carl Nightingale is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachu-setts, Amherst and is currently a visiting professor of history at the University of Wis-consin–Milwaukee. He is the author of On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Childrenand Their American Dreams (1993) and is currently working on a project titled “TheGhetto in the Global Village: A World History of the Urban Color Line.”



THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF EARLYTWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN URBAN

SEGREGATION

By Carl H. Nightingale State University of New York at Buffalo

"Segregation is apparent everywhere," warned Dr. Ernest Lyon to a standing-room only congregation at Baltimore's largely black John Wesley MethodistEpiscopal Church on December 4, 1910. Cities divided by race could be found"not only in the United States, but even in Africa, the natural habitat of theblack man." Lyon could speak from experience. He had just returned from Liberia,where he had been the U.S. Resident Minister and Consul Ceneral since 1903.In his sermon he reported that in the neighboring British colony of Sierra Leone"the whites have vacated the valleys, leaving them to the blacks, while they haveescaped to the mountains. This method obtains throughout that vast continent,wherever the Anglo-Saxon and Teuton are found."'

Lyon was speaking of "Hill Station," an all-European residential zone thatBritish authorities developed on a small mountaintop a few miles outside Free-town, Sierra Leone's capital, on a plan borrowed from longstanding practices inIndia.^ He also may have heen alluding to reports of intensifying segregation inSouth Africa. But his grim picture of an emerging global segregationism clearlycontained troubling local significance. "The city fathers of Baltimore," Lyon re-minded his audience, "are having under advisement at this time a measure whichseeks to deprive free men . . . of their right to live and own property anywherethey can." Two weeks later, on December 20, Baltimore Mayor John Barry Ma-hool signed into law the so-called West Segregation Ordinance, named afterits sponsor in City Council Samuel L. West. The measure divided every streetin Baltimore into "white blocks" and "colored blocks," based on the "race" ofthe majority of their inhabitants at the time of the Ordinance's passage. It seta penalty of one hundred dollars and up to a year in the Baltimore City Jail foranyone who moved on to a block set aside for the "opposite race," except blackservants who lived in the houses of their white employers.

The law ran into repeated problems in the courts, forcing the city council.Mayor Mahool, and his successor James H. Preston to pass a total of four ver-sions over the ensuing years—the second in April, 1911; the third a month later;and the fourth in September, 1913. But the mayor's office received enthusias-tic letters fi"om all points of the compass requesting copies of the most recentversion of the Ordinance—including the mayors of numerous southern cities.New York City's Title and Mortgage Company, Chicago's City Hall, the pow-erful Chicago Real Estate Board, and even the imperial authorities at Cebu inthe U.S.-occupied Philippines.'' Authorities in dozens of U.S. cities from At-lanta to St. Louis to New Orleans passed copycat legislation. In 1913, Balti-more's segregation ordinance helped inspire an unsuccessful campaign to estab-lish South-African style rural segregation in the Southern countryside. Lawyersfor the Baltimore chapter of the still-fledgling National Association for the Ad-vancement of Colored People fought the law locally, forcing its most extensive

668 journal of social history spring 2006

revision in 1913. Then the national office of the NAACP brought a test suitagainst a similar law in Louisville, Kentucky. Its efforts bore fruit in the SupremeCourt's Buchanan vs Warley decision which declared residential segregation bymunicipal ordinance unconstitutional. Even so, the west Ordinance remainedinspirational to racists: urban authorities in still other Southern cities and inKu-Klux-Klan-dominated Indianapolis passed new versions well into the 1920sand even as late as 1940.

This paper takes up the theme in Reverend Lyon's sermon that Baltimore'ssegregation schemes were in some way connected to those in Africa and else-where. It is based on the idea that social historians' techniques of closely-textured research can play a key role in the elaboration of world historical devel-opments. World historians, meanwhile, can advance their own goals by ground-ing what has been largely a theoretical field by digging deeply into local stories.To accomplish this methodological alchemy, 1 combine archival work into thesocial and intellectual history of the movement to pass the West Ordinance witha wide-ranging synthetic reading of trends in urban history throughout the Westand the expanding world of Western colonialism, especially highlighting trendsin India and South Africa.

The early twentieth century witnessed a planet-wide proliferation of residen-tially segregated cities designed to uphold racial hierarchies. Colonial regimeslike that of the British in Sierra Leone were the biggest builders of these dividedcities. The tradition began in the late seventeenth century when the BritishEast India Company officially designated separate walled sections of its capi-tal at Madras, India as "White Town" and "Black Town." In the nineteenthcentury the British and then other European imperial powers developed newtechniques of urban segregation, laying out separate districts for Europeans and"natives" in literally hundreds of cities, especially in the aftermath of the CreatUprising of 1856 in India, and then again after the Scramble for Africa. Theproject culminated in the early 20th century, in what Janet Abu Lughod called"apartheid Rabat" in French Morocco and Edwin Lutyens' capital for the BritishRaj at New Delhi, which had no less than five separate zones divided by colorand rank. Canada, Australia, some places in the Carribean, and even Brazil sawsimilar segregation schemes during the same period, some successful, others lessso.* But the most long-lasting of all were the locations and townships of SouthAfrica' and the black ghettos of American cities like Baltimore,^ both of whichhad earlier precedents, but both of which were firmly and widely institutional-ized in the early twentieth century as well.

Baltimore's West Ordinance was not explicitly modeled on segregationist ef-forts in cities abroad, nor did its major proponents leave any evidence that theywere specifically aware of or in touch with people leading such efforts elsewherein the world. However, the ideological and political strategies employed by seg-regationists in Baltimore in 1910 were derived from and helped to augment threeoverlapping but distinct transnational conversations. The first of these conver-sations concerned the world geography of the "races"; the second concernedrace and urban reform, particularly concerning public health; and the thirdconcerned middle-class control of urban and suburban property markets. Thedirect participants in these conversations included colonial officials, academics,professionals, and propagandists—and many world-renowned figures could be

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 669

counted among them. They lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic andin the far flung colonies, and sometimes traveled across all of these geographicareas. They traded ideas and argued with each other within transnational andpan-imperial institutions which they themselves built, including agencies of im-perial government, professional organizations, international conferences, andscholarly journals. Tliough the three conversations on race, reform, and prop-erty were themselves not always centrally focused on urban racial segregation,all three provided essential ideological ammunition for local efforts to createracially separate residential districts in one way or another in cities on virtuallyevery inhabited continent of the earth during this period.

Sometimes, most often in European colonies, the transnationally connectedexperts themselves took personal leadership roles in implementing plans to repli-cate segregated cities in new locations. In Baltimore, the most prominent ex-perts generally held back, and local residential segregationists came from pro-fessions that were, at most, only indirectly involved in the process of creatingand diffusing new knowledge on race, urban reform, and property markets. Theproponents of the Baltimore segregation ordinances were thus amateurs, but assuch they tapped into the conversations of internationally connected expertsinformally, either by reading their work or absorbing knowledge second handthrough conversations with each other and through popular media. National,regional, and local conditions determined which ideas the Baltimore segrega-tionists embraced with greatest vigor—like the idea that "commingled races"were inherently prone to conflict and the idea that blacks brought down de-clining property values—as well as the ones they received somewhat more luke-warmly, such as the equation of blacks with disease. The worldwide diffusion ofideas about racial geography, urban reform, and property markets thus providethe transnational intellectual and institutional contexts in which to formulatecomparative insights about the segregation of cities across the world during thisperiod of convergence, when segregation came to places—India, West Africa,South Africa, and the United States among others—that had otherwise starklydiffering political, institutional, economic, demographic, and cultural histories.Finally, when read with transnational contexts in mind, the social historicalrecord of the events surrounding the ordinance suggests how innovations cre-ated during the course of segregating US cities had important significance else-where in the world.

Questions of space have always been critical to the idea of race. Race, afterall, came into intellectual prominence as a concept during the late eighteenthcentury as part of inquiries into the world geography of human difference. Indiscussions which spanned Europe, the Americas, and the colonies, academics,colonial officials, and propagandists on either side of the slavery question de-bated the merits of separation of the races largely on two geographic scales, themacro-scale of the continent—whether it was suitable for races from one partof the world to live on continents deemed to be "natural habitats" of others—and the micro-scale of intimate relationships—whether it was a good thing for


people of different races to reproduce and create mixed-race peoples.' The ideathat cities should have separate sections for the races helped resolve some of theideological problems that arose in these debates. In India during the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British faced critics who felt that An-glo Saxons risked racial degeneration by getting too intimate with Indians andby spending too much time in tropical climates unsuitable for whites. One re-sponse was a vast expansion their early modern Black Town/White Town model,including the development of segregated military cantonments for soldiers, sep-arate civil lines for administrators, and hill stations such as cool, foggy Simla,in the foothills of Himalayas, a kind of ersatz English country town where alarge segment of the British Raj decamped every summer to escape the heat ofCalcutta and even, some imagined, India itself. Similar ideas justified the appro-priation of choice rural land for whites only in South Africa and for the idea thatAfricans should be kept out of cities altogether, except when rendering specificservices to whites.'"

In the United States, macro- and micro-segregationist notions lay at the heartof Manifest Destiny, Indian extermination and reservations, black colonizationschemes, Chinese and other Asian exclusion measures, and the 1924 Immigra-tion Restriction Act." Advocates of slavery, by contrast, had to embrace conti-nental integration, even as they vigorously (if only theoretically) opposed sexualintermixing of races. At their most enthusiastic, they portrayed Africans' "juxta-position" with whites in the Southern States as a divine plan to bring an inferiorrace in contact with the good influences of their racial superiors.'^ After eman-cipation, ideologues like Henry Grady grew less sanguine about the "commin-gling" of the races in a single region, portraying the South's "negro problem" as aunique historic cross the region had to bear. It was a situation which could onlywork if blacks were deprived of the vote, thus bringing them under a tutelageto whites that would more closely approximate colonialism elsewhere. For thisgloomier vision, Grady drew heavily on new developments in the internationalscientific conversatidns on racial geography, particularly the Social Darwinianview of humankind locked in a perpetual struggle between fit and unfit races. Healso worried about what he saw as an increase in the sexual assertiveness of blackmen, and the likelihood that it would provoke the race-instincts of whites to joinlynch mobs that would undermine the economic prospects of the region. Onlyby depriving blacks of political ambition could the region minimize the clash of"race instincts" inevitable between differing races living in close proximity.'^

In Baltimore, these arguments were the intellectual common wisdom of the"city fathers" Dr. Lyon alluded to, the group of disfranchisers and segregation-ists who gathered forces in 1910 to promote the West Ordinance. In additionto Councilman West and Mayors Mahool and Preston, there were five otherkey players: Milton Dashiell, a lawyer who had a hand in writing every ver-sion of the law; Edgar Allen Poe, the City Solicitor (and great-nephew of thefamous author) who repeatedly vouched for the constitutionality of the ordi-nance; William Luke Marbury, another, much more prominent lawyer who tes-tified on behalf of the ordinance from the beginning and who helped Dashiellrewrite it twice during the spring of 1911 after it ran into trouble in the localcourts; Charles H. Grasty, editor of the Baltimore News from the 1890s and, as of1910, owner and editor of the venerable Baltimore Sun, whose progressive edito-


rial pages bristled with endorsements for the ordinance throughout the process;and William Cahell Bruce, the prominent Maryland politician and race theo-rist, who played an important role in the career of most of the other players.In addition, the historical record contains smaller snippets of information ahoutwhat we might call the grassroots of the segregation ordinance movement: someeighty-five people, including officers of neighborhood associations, letter writ-ers, and signers of petitions. A collective biography of these men and womenreveals how international conversations about racial geography and race con-flict came to be understood in an American urban context, and in particularhow this played out in a border-state city like Baltimore, Maryland—redolentas it was of the influences of region, political party, profession, day-to-day urbanexistence, and the highly charged politics of a few local neighborhoods.'''

Influences from abroad and contemporary world-historical analyses of the ge-ography of the races for the most part entered the discourse on racial conflict inBaltimore through a channel largely unexplored by historians of transnationalconnections, that of amateur interest. Bruce, Grasty, and Marbury all traveledquite extensively on business in Europe and across North America, but the shar-ing or acquisition of formal expertise does not appear to have been a goal ofthose trips—as it was in, say, contemporary social reformers' "sociological tours"to Europe described by Daniel T. Rodgers.'^ None of the principal supporters ofthe West Ordinance left evidence that they visited segregated cities in Asia orAfrica, as did the equally cosmopolitan Dr. Lyon. Only Grasty the newspaper-man belonged to a profession that involved extensive international interchangeof specialized ideas and knowledge. The lawyers who crafted the Ordinance werethus users and implementers of racial ideas that percolated to them, no doubtthrough many separate intellectual channels, from transoceanic debates of aca-demics and imperialists.

All of the ordinance supporters had personal or political connections withWilliam Cabell Bruce, graduate of the University of Maryland Law School, Bal-timore City Solicitor, State Representative, and later U.S. Senator. His rise as apolitician began in 1891 when he elaborated Henry Grady's arguments for dis-franchisement in a pamphlet entitled "The Negro Problem." Like Grady, Brucedrew freely on Social Darwinism. Something of a racist's world historical per-spective frames his work. His pamphlet begins by comparing Southern whites'feelings towards blacks with the "inveterate aversion" that kept "the Englishmanand the East Indian or the American and the Mongolian sullenly apart evenwhen brought to the closest contiguity in point of space." The attorney WilliamLuke Marbury was Bruce's closest friend in law school, and the two shared theo-retical and political insights throughout their careers. Marbury, his son tells us ina memoir, often held forth in his formidable Baltimore parlor on the latest racisttheories; his tastes ran to the Comte de Gobineau and, later, to Madison Grant.The editorial pages of Charles Grasty's newspapers are filled with the all thecliches of Social Darwinism and repeatedly draw on the common wisdom aboutwhite man's burden and empire. Indeed, for other middle-class Baltimoreanswho joined the crusades for racial segregation ordinances, Grasty's papers musthave been the most widely read analysis of race relations on a global scale.'^On the basis of such ideas. West Ordinance supporters could propound theirbeliefs on race relations with a sense of certainty and universalistic scientific


authority. In his report to Mayor Mahool asserting the constitutionality of theOrdinance, for example. City Solicitor Edgar Allen Poe maintained that "it can-not be denied at this late day that one of the greatest problems that confrontsthe Southern States is the negro problem" and referred readers to "irrefutablefacts, well-known conditions, inherent personal characteristics and ineradica-ble traits of character peculiar to the races, close association on a footing ofabsolute equality is utterly impossible between them, wherever negroes exist inlarge numbers in a white community, and invariably leads to irritation, friction,disorder, and strife."'^

That said. West Ordinance supporters also elaborated their ideas about raceconflict with much more specific reference to their time and place. All of theeight most prominent supporters were born and grew up in the rural south, some,like Bruce and Marbury, on substantial post-bellum plantations. Both Bruce andMarbury left behind nostalgic remembrances of their rural youth and the sup-posedly friendly race relations they experienced on sharecropping plantations.'^Many of the ordinance's grassroots supporters also seem to have hailed fromamong the city's well-known multitudes of dyed-in-the-wool "Southrons."'^

It was clear to all these figures, however, that Baltimore was no plantation.Not only had racial conflict increased since the end of slavery, but efforts todeal with this problem through disfranchisement were frustrated by the urbanpolitics of Baltimore itself. ° Many of the West Ordinance supporters, Marbury,Bruce, and Poe foremost among them, had labored long to deprive blacks of thevote in Maryland, without success. The issue dominated state politics from about1901 to 1911, but the state legislature three times narrowly voted down disfran-chising amendments. In all of these campaigns, the city of Baltimore played animportant role in making things difficult. Unlike other southern cities, Balti-more harbored many Republican—the most loyal of whom, black people, stoodto lose their vote—and also a large population of recent immigrants from Eu-rope, who were understandably worried that their franchise would be the nextto be written off. Blacks had also organized into a considerable political force,first under the indomitable leadership of Reverend Lyon, then by electing a suc-cession of black city councilors, then by founding a branch office of the Na-tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whichincluded among its ranks a fearless star lawyer named W. Ashbee Hawkins. Mak-ing things worse for the disfranchisers, Maryland's Democratic Party was itselfdivided over support for the notoriously corrupt Gorman-Rasin machine, whichdominated both state and local politics at the turn of the century and which hadnakedly sought to use disfranchisement to eliminate the votes of white reformistDemocrat detractors as well as blacks. Meanwhile, a Jim Crow rail coach law didsqueak through the Maryland legislature in 1904 despite the heroic and nearlysuccessful resistance efforts of Dr. Lyon on the eve of his departure to Liberia. Aboycott and a lawsuit by well-to do blacks from Maryland and Washington D.C.later restricted it to intra-state travel only. Other Jim Crow statutes, such as aBaltimore City trolley segregation ordinance, languished into the mid-1910s,with the NAACP and Ashbee Hawkins fighting them every step of the way. '

By 1910, the leaders of Maryland's disfranchisement movement were lick-ing their wounds, none perhaps more so than William Marbury, who had oncesought to parlay his dogged efforts against the Democratic machine, Republi-


cans, and negroes into a U.S. Senate seat. Then the vagaries of urban racialpolitics struck again, when NAACP lawyer W. Ashbee Hawkins bought a housein Baltimore's Northwest Side. Marbury, Dashiell, West, and Poe all lived inthis neighborhood, which lay a little over a mile from downtown. It had earlierpicked up the nickname "favored fan" because its elegant streets angled awayf rom the city's north-south grid at forty five degrees, and because it occupied thecrest of a hill then called Mount Royal, which once allowed its wealthy residentsto occupy the physical as well as the social summit of the city. By 1910, though,Baltimore had expanded dramatically outward from its historic core, pressingup against what had once been a distant suburb. Many of the city's most promi-nent residents, including Mahool, Preston, Grasty, and Bruce, had chosen evenfancier neighborhoods to live in, such as Mount Vernon, whose housing priceswere considered safely beyond the means of the wealthiest blacks, or the moredistant suburb of Roland Park, an exclusive development that Grasty had helpedfinance and that for a while even contained a street named after him. ^

Baltimore's growth reflected, in great part, the expansion of its already rela-tively substantial black population, which by 1910 numbered around 80,000 andwas the country's second biggest after New Orleans. During the first decades ofthe century, large numbers of black people had moved into an area adjoining the"favored fan" to the southwest. Most were poor, and they crowded into congestedplaces like Biddle Alley, which emptied into Druid Hill Avenue, the southernboundary of the Northwest Side, a street which had become largely black it-self. Others, like the NAACP's W. Ashbie Hawkins and his law partner GeorgeE McMechen, were well-to-do enough to afford houses in the Northwest Sideitself. '' In June 1910, Hawkins bought the house at 1834 McCuUoh Street—one of the diagonal spokes of the favored fan—and rented it to McMechen.On July 5th, white residents of the Northwest Side gathered in a mass meeting.They founded the McCuUoh Street, Madison Avenue, and Eutaw Place Prop-erty Protective Association (MMEPPA) and were joined in their protest shortlyafterward by numerous similar groups, including the Northwest ImprovementAssociation of Baltimore, and the Harlem Improvement Association, based inanother white middle-class neighborhood nearby where Hawkins himself hadsettled. ^ Petitions began circulating throughout the neighborhoods for imme-diate help from the city, calling for segregation to stop the "negro invasion" ofthe Northwest Side.

The idea of separating blacks from whites in cities was relatively new in thefield of racial geography and race war in the South, and it reflected character-istically urban concerns. Baltimore's difficult border-state politics were not theonly thing that distinguished the city from paternalists' illusions of Old Southplantations and their harmonious racial "juxtaposition." In the wake of emanci-pation, the growth of cities all across the South challenged old racial verities. Inslave cities, racial separation had been unthinkable—large neighborhoods setaside for blacks would have quickly become organizing grounds for slave revoltswhich could have overthrown the whole "peculiar institution." As William Ca-bell Bruce had suggested in his tract "The Negro Problem", the big threat citiesposed to most Old South paternalists even well after emancipation was the dis-tance blacks elected to put between themselves and whites, not the proximityof the races. In the post-emancipation city, though, new problems arose. On


plantations and in small rural towns, everyone knew everyone and social hi-erarchies were clear, even when variations in skin color sometimes made raceitself ambiguous. In the anonymous spaces of the city, as Grace Elizabeth Halehas argued blacks could challenge their "place" in the racial hierarchy simply bypurchasing markers of class, such as elegant clothes or vehicles. Or, if they hadlight skin, they could elude the radar of "one-drop" rules and pass as white. Also,an ambiguous sexual charge pervaded daily life in cities, as unacquainted blacksand whites apprized each other on sidewalks or jostled each other in trolley carsor the aisles of stores. The threat to whites intensified as some blacks achievedprofessional positions that technically put them on a par with members of thewhite urban elite, and even more so when they purchased that most powerful asymbol of social status, a house in an elite neighborhood.^^

Jim Crow ordinances segregating rail and trolley cars, theaters, restaurants andother public amenities signaled Southern whites' final rejection of physical prox-imity as a method of social control, and their embrace of distance. While whiteBaltimoreans struggled to implement such laws, they also more firmly closed offaccess to the social clubs and the professional societies that might have allowedNegro lawyers and doctors to better establish their reputations. They also warilywatched the housing market for signs of racial conflict, for vandalism and "nearriots" had broken out on previous occasions when blacks had moved into otherwhite, mostly working class, neighborhoods.^' When Hawkins and McMechen,two black lawyers who had helped wrestle disfranchisement to its death, thenperformed a bold flanking move around Jim Crow strictures and broke the colorline around the "favored fan," the threat to exclusive white privilege was toomuch to bear. West, Dashiell, Poe, and Marbury in particular must have won-dered at times whether their own biological racial instincts were summoningthem to fight back.

"It is humiliating and annoying to the white residents of this neighborhoodto have them here," wrote an assembly of white homeowners to Baltimore'smayor. ^ Abstract concepts like inevitable racial conflict clearly achieved adeeply personal meaning to whites whose bastions of prestige were being "in-vaded." In the case of white lawyers like West, Poe, Marbury, and especiallyDashiell, professional rivalries with their black counterparts palpably inflectedthe exchanges they traded in print.^'

In their public pronouncements, the most prominent supporters of the Or-dinance avoided explicitly raising the specter of interracial sex or the threat ofblack men raping white women, a theme so widespread in southern politics atthe time. No doubt their language of the inherent conflicts of "commingled"races allowed them to maintain their reformist high gtound while evoking amore fire-eating, sexualized imagery anyway. Grassroots supporters were also,for the most part, similarly restrained, though one wrote of his concern that theconversion of a previously white school to use for blacks would both encouragethe rise in black homeownership in the Northwest Side and create a situationwhere "large colored boys and girls would come into daily touch with the girlswho attended Western High School," a particularly jealously guarded all-whitejewel in the neighborhood's crown.^"

The undertow of racial panic and a sense of impending race war are palpable,though, especially at three key moments. The first occurred on July 4th of 1910


shortly after McMechen moved in, when a great disaster stuck the "white race"in Reno, Nevada. In a prizefight monitored carefully in the Baltimore press,across the U.S., South Africa, and in nervous colonial offices around the world,the black boxer Jack Johnson, defiant public consort of white women and flam-boyant displayer of his wealth and fame, soundly defeated the white championJim Jeffries. Riots broke out across the U.S. as whites expressed their humiliationby attacking and lynching blacks indiscriminately, often right in the open in citystreets. Baltimore Mayor Mahool, like local officials across the country and else-where in the world, immediately took action to stop the showing of newsreelsof the fight in the city's movie houses. The very next day, July 5th, was the daythe MMEPPA met for the first time to push for legal action against the "Negroinvasion."^'

Then, three years later, during the summer of 1913, Ashbee Hawkins useda test case to convince a Court of Appeals to void the third version of the or-dinance on a technical point, and Mayor Preston was unable to assemble citycouncil to return from vacation to pass a new law. Neighborhood associationssent a flood of letters and petitions to Preston's office ruing Marbury's incompe-tence and replete with warnings of "invasion," "lawlessness," "racial antagonismand animosity, conflict and disorder," as well as "bitterness and hatred" broughtabout by "the forced effort to force social equality by mingling the habitationsof white and black races." One letter writer, a woman who ran a novelty shop,asked Preston to "find some way short of wholesale murder to get rid of theinvaders."^^

Finally, in 1917 and 1918, as it sunk in that the Buchanan decision madeit virtually impossible to craft a new ordinance that would fly in the courts,distraught homeowners once again put pen to paper with their fears, wonderingangrily if "the White People [Are] to be Driven out of Baltimore?" and warningthat "this city will soon be a second Darkest Africa." One particularly activewoman even fired a letter off to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna,demanding to know "if the whole country was to be given over to the colored

" ^

The idea that the segregation ordinance "Should Bring Peace" between theraces helped its supporters both narrowly and on a more exalted level. Mostnarrowly, racial conflict rhetoric helped segregationists' legal case. Matters ofpublic order fell under the city's legitimate use of police power. According tosupporters, the race conflicts that threatened to engulf the city were sufficientto justify strong measures on the part of municipal government. Furthermore,they argued, the West Ordinance met the test for constitutional limitations onpolice powers because bore a "reasonable relation to the exigency leading to itspassage." The specter of racial conflict also allowed City Solicitor Edgar AllenPoe to argue the continuity between legalized residential segregation and anti-miscegenation and Jim Crow statutes, which the Supreme Court had alreadyvalidated, most famously in Plessy v. Ferguson.^'^

On a grander note. West Ordinance supporters used arguments from the globalconversations on racial geography to give their crusade a sense of statesmanship


and the high moral ground of moderation. As they had argued in disfranchise-ment campaigns, the Ordinance did the local work needed to address a problemwith a scope much larger than Baltimore and its neighborhoods. Indeed, thelaw's supporters could portray themselves as the only sensible players in a worlddominated by those on one extreme who wanted to arm blacks with the votingpower they needed to escalate racial conflict and extremists on the other sidewho spoiled for a chance to eliminate Africans on American soil through racialArmageddon or gradual extinction.

The means the self-styled reformers chose for their racial crusade, residentialsegregation, inherently involved the manipulation of urban space. West Ordi-nance supporters were not alone in thinking of urban space as a great problemsolver. This was an era when the structure of cities inspired the imagination ofhosts of reformist visionaries the world over, people who thought urban spacescould express the greatest aspirations of civilization and who also had grow-ing faith in humans' capacity to solve millennia-old urban problems. By 1910,numerous groups of well-organized professionals and officials had grown deeplyinterested in ways that urban space might be altered to end urban vice, corrup-tion, crime, political unrest, and disease. Since they were also deeply tapped intoquestions about racial matters, and since urban problems could be so easily cou-pled with ideas about the dangers of race conflict, mixing, and degeneration,they often spoke of urban problems in racialized ways.'' In many parts of theworld the separation of the races was thus seen as a necessary step in solving ur-ban problems and a fundamental principal of ambitious plans to transform theshape of cities.

Baltimore became a center of this racialized urban reformist sentiment, andthe city's public health reformers, who specialized in the prevention of tubercu-losis, were especially influential on an international scale. The city's historianshave often assumed that proponents of the segregation ordinance promoted thelaw as a public health measure, designed to spread the spread of tuberculosisfrom black slums to white neighborhoods.^* That is to some extent true. Forexample, the same editorial in the Sun that proclaimed the Ordinance a guar-antor of racial peace also assured readers that the measure would "contributeto the health and efficiency of the colored population." The rawer sentimentthat negroes endangered the health of whites was quite common among grass-roots supporters of segregation as well.^' However, looked at in transnationalperspective, it is clear that Baltimore's segregationists—despite their self-imageas reformers and despite their interest in changing urban space—did not makethe kinds of deep ties with other urban reformers as their counterparts did else-where in the world. The relative political distance they maintained also revealssome big limits in the extent to which West Ordinance supporters—and Ameri-can urban racial segregationists in general—ever thought about reshaping citiesaccording to grand spatial designs.

The urban reformers with the most impact on the proliferation of urban racialsegregation worldwide were people concerned with disease: doctors, medical re-searchers, public health practitioners, and sanitation experts. These professionsorganized along transnational lines relatively early in the nineteenth century,and their conferences and journals were heavily preoccupied by the idea thaturban disease, whether carried by miasmas, infections, or contagions, could be


stopped by isolating different groups of people from one another, whether byquarantine, in sanatoria, or in separate residential zones of a city. "Segregation"was originally a medico-scientific term describing the separation of chemicalsubstances from one another in experiments, and it later emerged as a termto designate the isolation of human sources of disease. Public health officialsalso pioneered the use of disease mapping to identify the location of the sourcesof disease. These linguistic and technical innovations lent themselves well toracialized conceptions of public health: non-Europeans were the source of dis-ease, and separating Europeans from natives in cities, especially tropical ones,would solve a major dilemma of empire, the high death rate of European colo-nial officials. Some of the world's greatest scientists traded in these ideas, themost important being Ronald Ross, the discoverer of the connection betweenmosquitos and malaria, who praised programs of European segregation in In-dia and West Africa. ^ In addition, sanitarians spearheaded the idea that urbanslums should be regulated or cleared altogether, a program which would haveenormous impact on the shape of cities and on the techniques and politics ofracial separation in many places worldwide.

Such thinking was critical in the development of separate European districtsin India and elsewhere in the tropical colonies. On the advice of sanitationexperts, colonial authorities and engineers sited these enclaves upwind from"native" residential zones, and architects filled the "White Towns" with widely-spaced bungalows whose ventilation systems were scientifically designed to thedispel bad air and germs imagined to be emanating from across the color line.Hill Station in Freetown, Sierra Leone represented a new advance in this fieldmade possible by Ross's identification of mosquitoes as the vector for malariagerms, and the idea that African bodies, customs, and neighborhoods were par-ticularly likely to generate both germs and mosquitos. The site for Hill Stationwas selected by calculating the distance a mosquito could fly from the Africantown, adding altitude for good measure. Authorities in South Africa used sim-ilar arguments, which historian Maynard Swanson dubbed the "sanitation syn-drome," amidst outbreaks of other infectious diseases, as a pretext for the es-tablishment of African locations on the outskirts of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth,Durban, and Johannesburg. In Johannesburg, sanitarians linked the health prob-lems of slums to blacks, coloreds, and Asians, and referred to the imperativesof public health to clear those inner-city slums and remove their inhabitantsto racially separate ex-urban townships. The same logic justified the provisionof much higher-standard suburban public housing for working-class and poorwhites.''^

In the United States, the sanitation syndrome had a widespread impact on ur-ban social politics as well, first on the West Coast, where opponents of Chineseimmigration regularly compared the influx of Asians itself to a pestilence. Incities such as San Francisco, public health officials helped fan anti-Chinese sen-timent to pass the country's first urban segregation laws restricting the spreadof Chinatown, and at one point even threatened to remove the whole Chi-nese population to an industrial suburb. If the courts had not intervened, theywould have created the closest thing in the United States to a South Africantownship.''"

Baltimore had already become a site of considerable significance for discus-


sions of urban sanitation and race by the 1880s. Then, Baltimore doctors likeEdward Gilliam and William Lee Howard had played key roles in a nationaldebate on a question critical to race conflict theory: whether the black popu-lation was actually growing despite its inherent inferiority, thus threatening towrest control of North America; or decreasing, as the theory of the survival ofthe fittest would predict, to the point of racial extinction. The influential writerFrederick L. Hoffman resolved this debate in favor of racial extinction by mus-tering new-fangled vital statistics collected by municipal health commissions,including Baltimore's, to show that blacks' greater propensity for vice and dis-ease had increased their death rates since slavery. Segregation, he and Howardhad argued, was the only way to ensure that blacks' inevitable doom did notextend to whites.""

Baltimore made a truly international mark on this subject in the first decade ofthe twentieth century when the city's Municipal Health Commission teamed upwith the John Hopkins Medical School to launch an international exposition onthe prevention of tuberculosis. Because of the involvement of John Hopkins, theexposition could draw on the clout of two the world's most celebrated doctors,William Osier and William Welch, who were credited with bringing Europeanstandards of training to the United States, and who had also helped found theLaennec Society, based at the University, the first national association devotedto the study of tuberculosis.

The exposition toured across the U.S., traveled to points in Canada andMexico, climaxed at the International Conference on Tuberculosis in Wash-ington D.C. in 1908, and from there resonated "throughout Great Britain andher colonies" according to a prominent New York sanitarian. Exhibit A in theexposition was a map of Baltimore peppered with dots representing deaths fromtuberculosis in the city. The dots converged into a black mass centered on Bid-die Alley, the "lung block," part of the Negro slum across Druid Hill Avenuefrom the Northwest Side's favored fan. Viewers probably didn't need Baltimore'sDeputy Health Commissioner C. Hampson Jones to tell them what the map im-plied, that !'the prevalence of this disease amongst the colored people is a greatmenace to our white population.'"*^

By 1910, such fears were still fresh enough, and they do appear to have beenon the minds of grassroots supporters. Petitions from neighborhood associa-tions routinely included health concerns in their lists of problems caused bynegroes. Since guaranteeing the public health was one of the municipal obliga-tions which justified the use of city police powers, health concerns also madetheir way into legal briefs filed on behalf of the ordinance. As late as 1918, afull year after the law had been declared unconstitutional. Mayor Preston stillreceived letters from pro-ordinance homeowners who railed against the horrorsof the alleyways and kept tabs on the count of black tuberculosis deaths."*

Still, the "sanitation syndrome" played a decidedly secondary role in the rhe-toric of the segregation ordinance's most prominent backers, and, for their part,the city's most prominent doctors and sanitarians never went on public recordin clear support of the Ordinance. In part, this may reflect a problem in theargument's own tortuous racial logic, a problem public health-based argumentsfor segregation also faced in India, South Africa, and everywhere else they wereused. As many contemporary Baltimoreans noted, if black people were the cause

THE TRANSNATIONAL GONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 679

of disease, then the biggest problem facing whites was black household servants,not black neighbors. In Baltimore such servants routinely commuted from placeslike Biddle Alley to places like William Marbury's house on Lanvale Street,which employed no less than six black servants. Black laundresses washed andfolded many prominent white Baltimoreans' very clothes, towels, and bed sheets,often in their overcrowded alleyway hovels. Who could be sure that "infectedsputum" didn't make its way directly into the private sanctums of the "favoredfan" through that route? Framers of the West Ordinance, like residential color-line drawers going back to Madras, had made an exception for live-in blackservants, who could have access to the most intimate reaches of white people'shouses. If health concerns did not move whites to forego these services, howcould they argue that keeping blacks from living in separate houses, even ontheir street, would help prevent tuberculosis?'*''

Furthermore, some asked, wouldn't it make more sense to provide better hous-ing for blacks than to segregate them? The celebrated Baltimore contrarian (andinveterate racist) H.L. Mencken argued as much in an unpublished column at-tacking the West Ordinance:

Who ever heard of a plan for decent housing for negroes in Baltimore? . . . Thepersons who govern us have never looked into this matter. When the darky nowtries to move out of his sty into and into human habitation a policeman now stopshim. The law practically insists that he keep on incubating typhoid and tubercu-losis . . . for the delight and benefit of the whole town"

Gertainly Mencken was tight that reformers in Baltimore did little to improveconditions for blacks. Their exposes of other urban evils, like alleyway housing,prostitution, and crime, mostly reinforced the idea that blacks were constitu-tionally more prone to poverty, immorality and disease, and that they wouldbring those problems with them, like a contagion, wherever they moved. Sug-gestions for housing reform mostly focused on closing alleyways and clearingslums, a prescription which progressive city planners and William Welch didpublically endorse.''

No doubt the most prominent West Ordinance supporters knew that talk ofslum-clearance would only get them stuck in quagmires they'd prefer to avoid.First of all, black leaders themselves played up the alleyway issue: how could Or-dinance supporters claim to have the welfare of Negroes in mind if they expectedeven the most prominent leaders of the black community to live in filth whenthey could afford to live more decently? Secondly, closing up alleyways wouldonly put more pressure on the housing of the Northwest Side, not less. Whenauthorities had cleared a black slum for the Gamden Railroad Station earlier inthe century, the process only forced more blacks to move into the Druid HillAvenue area. Thirdly, slum clearance touched on the political third rail of prop-erty rights: American courts were much more solicitous of slumlords' intereststhan those elsewhere in the world. And finally, as Mencken had implied, no oneamong the conservative Ordinance supporters (or for that matter among mostprogressive housing reformers) wanted to contemplate the expense, let alonethe specter of socialism, involved in building public housing for blacks.'*'

No grand vision of city space emerged from the imaginations of early-centuryBaltimore segregationists as it would among the architects of Rabat, New Delhi,


or South African urban apartheid. No one jumped on board, for example, whenin 1911 Baltimore's city planner William Emmart, who himself lived on theNorthwest Side, proposed a comprehensive city plan which included alleywayclosings and "wide boulevards connecting together the various parks or 'squares'of [the Northwest Side] . . . and with Eutaw Place"—probably, as Emmart sug-gested, because of the jump in "tax rate" that would be needed to finance thescheme."* The Sun limited itself to weakly responding to black homeownersthat "Baltimore is large enough to provide suitable opportunities for the expan-sion of both races" and that they could find "decent sanitary residences" withinthe many blocks set aside by the Ordinance for black residence alone."" Indeed,looking back through the changes that occurred in American cities since the eraof segregation ordinances, it is important to remember that the West Ordinancesupporters did not even envision the creation of anything resembling a clearlydefined or contiguous black ghetto, unlike the creators of contemporary colonial"black towns" and South African locations. If left to stand, and if the black pop-ulation had not increased as dramatically as it did throughout the century, thelaw might have created something familiar in many other Southern cities at thetime: a racial patchwork with substantial numbers of at least theoretically mixedblocks. It was not until the emergency of the Great Depression, when the federalgovernment underwrote an expanded program of slum clearance and segregatedpublic housing projects for those displaced, that the sanitation syndrome had ahuge impact on the overall design of the American city and the growth of theAmerican ghetto.'°

In the 1910s, American segregationists' relationship with reformers who hadbigger urban visions in mind was much more opportunistic. To the extent thatfears of "black plagues" animated their supporters, the sanitation syndromeplayed into their hands. And to the extent that reform sentiment providedpolitical cover, it could be useful. If prominent reformers never endorsed theordinance, they did not publically lift a finger against it either: among whitesonly a small group of socialists opposed it once the initial kinks were workedout.'' When in triumph, progressive elites joined in organizing the first City-Wide Congress of Baltimore, on three days in March, 1911, as segregationistsgeared up to push for yet another version of the West Ordinance, their collec-tive stand must have been clear to the black community. Johns Hopkins Medi-cal School luminary Dr. William H, Welch shared vice-presidential duties, andlater the lectern, with the "negro problem" theorist William Cabell Bruce. TheMMEPPA, the Northwest Improvement Association, the Harlem ImprovementAssociation, and no less than twenty-seven other white neighborhood home-owner groups were all cordially invited, but no black minister, city councilman,or any representative of the NAACR On days like those, racial segregation-ists could camouflage themselves cozily amongst Baltimore's grand crusaders forurban reform,'

* * * * *

On most other days, Baltimore segregationists were much less interest in grandcity-wide plans than on retaining a quality of their own neighborhood, that is.

THE TEIANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 681

its racial exclusivity, and on individualistic concerns, getting a return on theirinvestments in their own homes. The argument that "the proximity of the Ne-gro race to good property means its undoing" was hy far the most oft-repeatedmantra of segregationists, from the leadership to the grassroots. ^ It clearly gavethe movement its higgest political draw. Supporters of the Ordinance, especiallythose from the grassroots, almost always followed up their rhetoric of "hlackperil" derived from racial theory and "black plague" derived from urban re-formism with reflections on the black threat to property.

When segregationists did translate their highly local and personal concernsinto a vision of the city, theirs was not a city suffused with the "cooperative"spirit reformers' called for so resoundingly at their Congress, nor was it a citythat even communicated clear lessons about racial hierarchies, as segregation-ists in India and South Africa contemplated at the same time. Instead, as weshall see, theirs was a city as self-promoter and competitor, a bloodied contes-tant in a zero-sum race against other cities for resources and growth. In this way.West Ordinance supporters helped forge a mindset central to American urbanpolicy throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. As part of that legacy, theproperty values argument ironically both spelled the death of municipal segre-gation ordinances themselves, and deeply inspired the longer-term success ofAmerican segregationism by other means.

Despite these differences, racial arguments about property values in generaldeveloped in the context of conversations of an international scope that, onceagain, involved professionals and propagandists in Europe, the colonies, andacross the Americas—conversations which in this case were critical to the verycreation of capitalist housing markets. These conversations concerned the def-inition of desirable urban real estate for the middle class and also argumentsover the best means to protect middle-class investors in that valued real estatefrom various sorts of threats. As Robert Fishman has shown, these debates goback at least to late-eighteenth century London, where evangelical moraliststouted the virtues of bourgeois enclaves in the city's first suburbs.'"* Contem-porary merchants in British India also promoted the value of life on the urbanfringe, in their case by using free-market arguments against the East India Com-pany's monopoly on outlying real estate in Asian colonial cities. There theysuccessfully convinced authorities to make grants of semi-rural land for "gardenhouses" and even to foot the bill for wider carriage roads designed to facilitatethe daily commute between the fringe and the business district of places likeMadras's White Town. ^ Such ideas later made their way via London to theAmericas through the international professional connections of architects, de-velopers, and later urban planners. Along the way, they helped foster the devel-opment of such quasi-suburbs as Baltimore's favored fan itself, platted out in the

5«Fishman and others have argued that gender and class segregation were crit-

ical to establishing the desirability and the property values of the urban fringe.Racial threats to the value of investing in "bourgeois Utopias" became an in-creasing concern as the nineteenth century wore on, first in India, then in SouthAfrica and the U.S., when black urban populations there began to grow quicklytowards the end of the nineteenth century. The precise idea that non-whitescould threaten white property played a different role in local segregation cam-


paigns across the world, however, depending first upon the extent and natureof white urban property ownership, and secondly on the legal context in whichgovernments could act in protection of whites and within which non-Europeanscould resist state-sponsored segregation.

In India and later West Africa, the European merchants and colonial officialswho invested in the relatively small private suburban housing markets generallydid not plan on remaining there long, let alone settle their families there forgenerations. In fact, most whites in in suburban civil lines and cantonments didnot own the houses they lived in at all; the Raj provided the typically tempo-rary shelter there as partial payment colonial service." At times, the Raj wascalled upon to protect white investors fearful of Indian neighbors, such as in theprivately-owned hill station of Simla during the 1890s. State action in thosecases was ruthless, directed by the law of conquest, and unbound by what onecommissioner called "sentimental reasons of freedom of movement and politico-economic reasons of liberty of trade." But even there, state action and whitegrassroots pressure never sustained itself in the way it would in the U.S. or SouthAfrica. Easter steam ships ultimately made the trip home to England just as easyand much more desirable than a summer stay in the hill stations, underscoringBritons' relative lack of commitment to real estate investments in India. Inde-pendence movements in Asia and Africa of course eventually sent most of allthe whites in a "White Town" home by the middle of the twentieth century.'^

In South Africa, by contrast, urban Africans faced a white settler populationthat invested in real estate with future generations in mind, and which was even-tually able to persuade the quasi-colonial state to use the law of conquest againstany assertion of black property rights. In 1913, as Baltimore finally passed thethird version of its beleaguered Ordinance on city blocks. South Africa passedthe Native Lands Act, which separated the whole country, rural as well as urban,by race, and envisaged nationwide measures of urban "influx control" designedto keep the vast majority of blacks on rural reserves. In such a climate, argumentsabout black threats to property values do seem to have flourished, though theyhave yet to be the subject of intensive research. Just as in some southern cities ofthe United States, for example, racially restrictive covenants appeared in realestate deeds of properties in Johannesburg's new suburbs as early as the 1890s.However, in the more repressive environment. South African authorities usedthe sanitation argument more readily than in places like Baltimore. The statewas also more able to circumvent organized resistance. Though African prop-erty owners often mobilized claims based on property rights to forestall dispos-sion of their houses in the name of segregationist schemes, white South Africansegregationists also backed up public health rhetoric with slum-clearance andsegregated black public housing, financed not by white tax payers but by theinfamously artful use of municipal monopolies on African beer sales. Disease-based arguments were critical to the passage of the Urban (Native Areas) Act of1923, which severely undercut black claims' to property rights, slowly strangledthe Afi-ican elite, and severely eroded local anti-segregationist movements.''

In American cities such as Baltimore, with their large settled white majorities,segregationists disseminated the idea that blacks brought down property valuesprobably more profusely than anywhere else in the world. To be sure, it couldnot have worked without the language of "black peril" and "black plague." But

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SECRECATION 683

the property values argument also took on a life of its own. Petitioners madeup statistics predicting in one case that property in the Northwest Side "woulddepreciate 25 per cent." An editorial in the Sun a few months later doubledthat figure to 50 percent. Such calculations helped translate the neighborhood'scrisis into one affecting the city as a whole, since depreciation on that scale"would mean a loss of about $600,000 in yearly taxes to the city." From there,segregationism became a part of city boosterism. In an early endorsement of theWest Ordinance, the Sun wrote that

a condition of affairs exists in some sections of the city which is a distinct reproachto our city in the eyes of the outside world, and not only injurious to the socialand business interests of the people of those sections more particularly affected, butvastly injurious to the reputation of the city as a whole as a place of residence.

In November of 1910, a city-wide census revealed that Baltimore's populationhad fallen behind that of Cleveland, moving the city down a notch from thefifth largest in the country to the sixth, and the idea spread that people wereavoiding the city because its prominent residents had failed to do something tokeep its large black population in check.*' Others despaired about the legacyof the urban improvements the city was making: "We are building a fine city,with civic centres, boulevards, monuments, etc., to be occupied by the coloredpeople when we all move to the suburbs. Why all these blessings? Are they thefavorite people?" "Have the colored people the right of eminent domain?" askedanother frantic letter writer.' ^ By May of 1911, though, the Sun was reassuringBaltimoreans that "the best advertisement Baltimore has had in the last decadeis the West Segregation Ordinance, as witnessed by the nation-wide interestshown by other municipalities in this law."

Such concern with Baltimore's competitive position, and pride for "this faircity on the Chesapeake" may have been real, but the Ordinance supporters' mainconcern was clear, as the very name of the MMEPPA, a Property Protection As-sociation, attested. The identity of "Property Owner Of Baltimore City," as oneletter-writer typed under his signature, was the glue that brought their otherwisefairly diverse ranks together—or, as another letter-writer chose to call herself,summing up the tone of three years of petitions that flooded city hall, "Prop-erty Owner—and Sufferer."*'' Once they accepted the idea that blacks wouldlower property values, it is clear that all of the petitioners did really have a lotto lose. Almost all of the eighty grassroots petitioners and letter-writers wholeft their identities in the public record in support of the West Ordinance livedin clusters closest to areas where black middle class people had bought homes.After lawyers, the largest occupational group among these supporters were sec-retaries and clerks, people who would have especially felt the weight of the pe-riod's burdensome mortgages and who would have been particularly concernedto guard whatever equity they had acquired in their house. Other large groupsincluded medium-sized business owners and shop owners, some of whose busi-nesses doubled as homes and who thus worried about risk to both; medical doc-tors, most of whose homes doubled as offices; and preachers, who worried outloud in their letters about losing their denomination's investment in expensivechurch buildings.*'


It was thus the city's "middling sort" that pushed the Ordinance through.Though some of Baltimore's bluest bloods, including about seventeen out ofthe fifty-three Officers and Members of the Executive Committee of the re-formist City-Wide Congress, still lived in the Northwest Side, most of the mostprominent citizens—blue-chip firm attorneys, bank presidents, top universityofficials and professors, and owners of heavy industrial corporations, the big to-bacco houses, and downtown hotels—lived well to the east or north of the colorline, whether in Mount Vemon, Roland Park, or in the surrounding country-side. Many of the wealthier people who did live in the neighborhood may havealso held somewhat less of a proportion their total assets in their homes, andhad more flexibility to move out with a gain. Whatever the economics of thesituation, it appeared to many, including black observers, that the true upper-crust of Baltimore had decided to stand above the fray of racial politics, issu-ing grand sentiments about urban reform, while they relied on their clerks andsecretaries—and maybe a few angry Southrons like Marbury and Grasty—to dothe bulk of the dirty work of segregating the town, ^

Real estate agents played a more ambiguous role in the movement, which dif-fered from that historians have described in other cities during the 1920s. For themost part real estate agents were not instrumental in founding the neighborhoodassociations that pushed the West Ordinance, Most were founded in the 1880s,long before fears of black invasion, and served other purposes. The MMEPPAmay have been an exception—a real estate agent was among the petitioners, andhe may have had a hand in organizing the group, as many agents did in citiesacross the country after 1920. Charles Grasty was heavily involved in the realestate business in the 1890s, and acquired the capital he used to buy the Newsand Sun through his involvement in the development of the suburb of RolandPark, Mayor J, Barry Mahool later became a major player in Baltimore real es-tate. However, only two other real estate agents are on record of having joinedin the petitions or any of the protective associations. The venerable BaltimoreReal Estate Exchange stayed out of the fray entirely, at least publically, perhapsimitating the behavior of most of its members' generally more prestigious andbusiness customers. As in segregationist efforts elsewhere, some "unscrupulousreal estate men" were also actually the target of many white property owners'anger, for "blockbusting" sales of houses in white neighborhoods to blacks,*'

The "real estate men" who were most active in the debate actually protestedagainst the first version of the West Ordinance, and precisely because it threat-ened their property values. These were the owners of speculative property inmixed blocks which were majority white at the time of the ordinance, blockswhich under the first version of the law would be considered white blocks. "Eventhough there may be colored people on either side of a vacant house," they com-plained, "the owner is, according to the terms of this ordinance, compelled torent it to white people," a very unlikely prospect, "or hold it vacant. Is thisbooming Baltimore? It does not appear that way to me." Such complainantstook pains to explain that they adamantly supported segregation, if in differ-ent form.*® They got their way, when the third version of the ordinance, whichMahool signed on May 15th, 1911, dropped all references to mixed blocks.

The biggest role of real estate agents in the segregation of Baltimore appearsto have been in the development of racially restrictive covenants, not the seg-


regation ordinance. Historians consider Baltimore's Roland Park to be amongthe forerunners of the restriction movement, since its developers Fredrick LawOlmstead Jr., Edward Bouton, and Gharles Grasty placed numerous restrictionson the land use and architectural style on the properties there. However, theyshied away from racial covenants on the advice of their lawyers who feared suchclauses would run counter to the 14th Amendment. When the same develop-ers opened the neighboring subdivision of Guilford in 1910, as the ferment onthe West Ordinance began, they felt emboldened enough to include restrictionson resale to Negroes to the deeds, in a pattern that may have reflected a prac-tice already common in other Southern cities. Still, the practice was not widelyknown in Baltimore even as late as 1917, when Mayor Preston, who lived inMount Vernon, responded to disappointed letters from Ordinance supportersby consulting a friend active in Chicago's real estate circles. Tlie advice theMayor received from the Windy City was to organize block associations to pro-mote restrictive covenants. The Real Estate Exchange of Baltimore apparentlyhad not yet considered this idea, but they soon endorsed a city-wide campaign,and William Marbury, among many others, enlisted his young son in the newcause, sending him to go door to door among the neighbors of the NorthwestSide with the latest idea about how to keep negroes out.^'

If the property values argument was the most effective of the three lines ofargument in developing political support for the West Ordinance, in the end,unlike the racial conflict argument, it did little to advance the law's cause inthe courts. Milton Dashiell's original draft of the Ordinance which bore the ti-tle "An ordinance for preserving order, securing property values and promotingthe great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore City" wasdismissed by the court precisely because securing property values was outsidethe purview of the city's police powers, and future versions of the law droppedthat phrase. But bigger legal issues were at stake. Residential segregation or-dinances ultimately fell to the argument that they interfered with individuals'right to dispose of property as they saw fit—a legal concept deeply embeddedin the common law, interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution, and central to laissez-faire economic ideology. When the NAACPorganized its test case against Louisville's segregation ordinance, it skillfully usedthe problems that arose in majority-white mixed blocks. The organization's lo-cal branch president William Warley contracted to buy a property in a blockdesignated white that had a large minority of blacks, then refused to go aheadwith the sale because it was illegal under the segregation ordinance. CharlesBuchanan, the seller, who was white, then sued Warley, claiming the ordinanceviolated his property rights. When the state courts upheld the ordinance, thecase went to the U.S. Supreme Court which unanimously decided in November1917 that "the difficult problem arising from a feeling of race hostility" was notenough of a justification to enact ordinances which "directly violat[ed] . . . thefundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitutionpreventing state interference with property rights by due process of law."^°

The American career of residential segregation by municipal ordinance thusended strangely. In a situation where whites had a strong stake in a capitalsist property market, arguments based on property values ran into the creativeefforts of a black professional class who mobilized arguments based on prop-


erty rights against it. This was something of a fluke, and it should be taken as asign of black lawyers' creativity, not the exceptionally enlightened character ofAmerican constitutionalism. In the early twentieth century neither the heroicefforts of black lawyers or even the most promising bodies of constitutional lawthey sought to use to their advantage were enough to make the Plessy-v. Fer-guson American judiciary anything approaching an ally in the struggle againstJim Crow. However, in the limited case of municipally ordered residential seg-regation, the NAACP could win a significant enough victory by leveraging theSupreme Court's Loc/iner-era laissez-faire liberalism and its insistence on a con-stitutional right to freedom of contract against the logic of Plessy. Like slumclearance, racial segregationism was, in this particular case, limited by the Amer-ican judiciary's especially fierce insistence on private property rights.

In comparative perspective, the Buchanan decision was quite significant none-theless. The question of constitutionality did continually help to undercutlarger-scale segregation schemes in the U.S., such as agricultural reformer Clar-ence Poe's South-African style efforts to segregate the rural south, or measuresto control African-American migration to the cities, as the Chicago Real Es-tate Board proposed in 1917, then promptly withdrew once the court spokein Buchanan. The end of residential segregation by municipal ordinance was,to be sure, only the beginning of the story of the state intervention on behalfof black ghettoization. U.S. courts went along with restrictive covenants until1948, and the Federal Housing Administration and other New Deal-era federalagencies positively "exhorted" segregation through racial discriminatory loan-guarantee programs, transportation policy, and public housing programs untilat least the early 1960s. Still, whites never got an explicit government guaran-tee that their neighborhoods would never be "invaded." In the absence of thatguarantee, however, the idea that blacks drove down property values did be-come among whites a kind of "average opinion about what the average opinionwill be" that placed race at the very heart of the valuation of real estate, andthus gave all white people regardless of their racial ideology an economic stakein segregation. The residential color line was thus effectively institutionalizedwithin the very economic marrow of the market for housing. It guaranteed thatthe color line would remain intact, even as many urban whites lost their fightto keep their neighborhoods white in the face of expanding black ghettos.'^

Across the world at the turn of the twentieth century local segregationistscobbled together different combinations of arguments derived from the threelarger conversations about the inherent conflict of commingled races, urban re-form, and urban property values. The differences in these efforts of ideologicalbricolage reflected more than white residential patterns and legal systems, how-ever, and this paper should be taken as an initial foray into the comparative his-tory of urban racial segregation, not a comprehensive treatment. India, SouthAfrica, and the United States were, of course, vastly different societies in manyother respects. In colonies like India, urban segregation was much more aboutcreating urban theaters for the display of imperial power and the health and


comfort of a relatively small number of Europeans on relatively temporary dutythan it was about control over private housing markets. In South Africa, urbansegregation and later apartheid undergirded the country's migrant labor systemand ultimately its police state as well as its divided property markets. Residentialsegregation in the United States by contrast was overwhelmingly focused on thegoal of sustaining white control over urban property, especially housing.

In that context, the fusing of race and property values became the touchstoneof the American segregationist imagination, not segregation by city ordinance.That made American segregation no less dangerous, and in the longer run it hasproved itself more durable than other forms. The marketized system of urban res-idential segregation—along with its consequences for unequal access to the jobmarket, education, and transport, and for unequal exposure to environmentaltoxins and the criminal justice system—remains virtually unscathed at the be-ginning of the twenty-first century, easily cloaked inside the broader New-Righteffort to sustain white privilege by denying the existence of institutionalizedracial inequality.

It also threatens to become a dangerous American export. As nineteenth-century colonialism fell, to be followed at long last by South African apartheid,a new global debate about urban segregation began. It started in Western Eu-rope, increasingly the home to its own giant urban populations of color, andthen flowed elsewhere in the world's European diaspora—to Canada, Australia,New Zealand, Brazil, and even South Africa itself. Had American-style "ghet-tos" somehow made their way from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to im-plant themselves in Paris, London, Munich, Toronto, Sydney, Sao Paulo, andJohannesburg?"

The global history of urban residential segregation offers two responses to thatquestion: One, Europeans, not Americans invented urban residential segrega-tion by color and race. Two, this advice: instead getting mixed up in all thesensationalism about ghettos growing in your midst, focus more on the presenceof racialized valuations of urban property, and learn more about the social andglobal historical dynamics that can bring such a system into being, Britain, withits redlining, racial steering, and increasingly racialized public housing systemshould serve as a good case in point. We need a new generation of Dr. Lyonsto send out the warning: such an ideological virus, capable of dividing hous-ing markets and spawning institutionalized racial inequalities, is one Americanproduct no one should seek to import.

Department of American StudiesBuffalo, NY 14260

ENDNOTES1, "Colored Methodists Should Get Out Says Dr, Lyon in Forceful Sermon," AfroAmerican Ledger (Baltimore), Dec 10, 1910 p. 4,

2, Stephen Frenkel and John Western, "Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation andMalarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone," Annals of the Associationof American Geographers 78 (1988): 211-28; Thomas S, Gale, "Segregation in British


West Africa," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 20 (1951) 495-507; Philip D. Curtin, "Medi-cal Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa," American Historical Review 90(1985): 600-601.

3. The first version of the West Ordinance (December 20, 1910) can be found in Bal-timore City Archives, Mahool Files, #404; the fourth, and most successful version, ofSeptember 25,1913 is published in Ordinances and Resolutions of the Mayor and City Goun-dl of Baltimore Passed at the Annual Session 1913-1914 (Baltimore, 1914), pp. 117-19. Asupplement to that version is on pp. 141-45.

4. See for examples, BCA, Mahool Files (MF) 406 Nov 5, 1910 Letter from Mayorof Roanoke, also 404 Dec 17 1910; 475 April 6, 1911, letter from Mahool to CharlesWoodruff, Cebu, Philippine Islands. BCA Preston Files (PF) 21-d March 26, 1916, letterfrom Harry A. Kahler, Esq President, New York Title & Mortgage Co., 135 Broadway,New York City, which says "The rapid increase in the negro population in New YorkCity is creating, in some sections of the city, very serious depreciation in real estate val-ues, aiifecting not only individual owners of property, but the City's revenue, throughfalling in taxable values. We are considering whether the lead taken by your City in thismatter may be taken as a guide for us, here." PF 21-d July 24, 1917 letter from FrederickRex of Chicago Municipal Reference Library, City Hall, Chicago. The Chicago Real Es-tate Board discussed a measure like Baltimore's in the Ghicago Real Estate Board Bulletin,1917, pp. 315,551. The CREB was influential in establishing the National Association ofReal Estate Boards (NAREB), and remained the most important body within the largerfederation for many years.

5. W Ashbie Hawkins, "A Year of Segregation in Baltimore," Crisis 3 (Nov., 1911), pp.27-30; Roger L. Rice, "Residential Segregation by Law, 1910-1917," Joumai of SouthernHistory 179 (1968) 179-99; Christopher Silver, "The Racial Origins of Zoning: South-ern Cities from 1910-40," Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 189-205; Garrett Power, "Apar-theid Baltimore Style: The Segregation Ordinances of 1910-1913," Maryland Law Review42 (1983): 289-349; Joseph L. Arnold, "Tbe Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin ofNeighborhood Associations in Baltimore, 1880-191 l,"Jounia/o/Urban History 6 (1979)3-30. Gretchen Boger, "Shifting Ground, Shifting Meaning: Baltimore's Residential Seg-regation Ordinances, 1910-1913," (unpublished M.A. research paper, Princeton Univer-sity, 2003 generously provided to the author by Gretchen Boger). On rural segregationsee Jack Temple Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South(Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 108-130; reference to influence of Baltimore on p. 123.

6. On early colonial cities and color segregation, see Carl Nightingale, "The Urban andGlobal Dynamics of Color Lines at Colonial Madras and New York" (unpublished paper);Thomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Towns and Cities," in The Cambridge Illustrated History ofthe British Empire, ed. P.J Marshall (Cambridge, U.K., 1996) pp. 242^3; Dilip K. Basu, ed.The Rise and Growth ofGolonial Port dries in Asia (Lanbam, MD, 1985). Por Madras, mostof the official sources for tbe period have been published. Government of Madras, Recordsof Fort St. George. Diary and Gonsultation Books (Madras, 1910-53), 82 volumes cover-ing 1672-1751; Despatches/rom England (Madras, 1911-71), 61 volumes covering 1670-1758; Despacc/ies to England (1670-1758) 61 vols. (Madras, 1916-32); Letters to Fort St.George, 1681-1765 45 vols. (Madras, 1916-1945); Letters from Fort. St. George 38 Vols.,(Madras, 1914^6). Otber primary sources are collected in: J. Talboys Wheeler, Annab ofthe Madras Presidency, Beinga History of the Presidency From the First Foundation to tAe Gov-emorship of Thomas Pitt, Grandfather of the Earl of Chatham Compiled from Official Records(1861; Delhi, 1982); William Poster, The Founding o/Fort St. George, Madras (London,


1902); and Henry DavisonLove, Vestiges o/0!d Madras, 1640-1800 Traced From the EastIndia Company's Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and From OtherSources (1913; New York, 1968), 3 vols. Also, see William Foster, The Founding of Fort St.George, Madras (London, 1902); N.S. Ramaswami, Fort St. George (Madras, 1980); andRamaswami, The Founding of Madras (Madras, 1977); Rao G.S. Srinavasachari, Historyof the Oity of Madras (Madras, 1939); Arjun Appadurai, "Right and Left Hand Castesin South India," Indian Economic and Social History Review, 11 (1974): 216-59; PatrickRoche, "Caste and the Merchant Government in Madras, 1639-1749" in Indian Economicand Social History Review 12 (1975): 381-407; Joseph J. Brenning, "Chief Merchants andthe European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel," Modem Asian Studies 11(1977): 321-40; Susan M. Nield, "Madras: The Growth of a Colonial City in India,1780-1840" (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1977); Susan M. Nield, "Colo-nial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and NineteenthCenturies," Modem Asian Studies 13 (1979): 217-46; Susan Nield-Basu, "The Dubashesof Madras," Modem Asian Studies 18 (1984): 1-31. On Calcutta: C.R. Wilson, ed. OldFort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing With its History (Lon-don, 1906); P.]. Marshall, "Eighteenth-Century Calcutta," in Colonial Cities ed. Robert J.Ross and Gerald J. Telkamp (Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1985), pp. 87-104; Marshall."British Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Bengal," Bengal, Past and Present 95 (1976):151-63; Marshall, "British Society Under the East India Company," Modem Asian Stud-ies 31 ((1997): 89-108; Marshall, "The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of theEast India Company," Modem Asian Studies 34 (2000): 307-31; Farhat Hassan, "Indige-nous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698-1750," ModemAsian Studies 26 (1992): 65-82; Rev. James Long, Calcutta and Its Neighborhood: Historyo/Calcutta and its People from 1690-1357 (Calcutta, 1974), edited by Sankar Sen Gupta;Sukanta Chauduri, Calcutta, The Living City Volume I: The Past (Calcutta, 1990); PradipSinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta, 1978); Durba Ghosh, "Colonial Compan-ions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India. 1760-1830" (Ph.DDissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000); Swati Chattopadhyay, "Blur-ring Boundaries: The Limits of White Town in Colonial Calcutta," Journal of the Societyof American Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 154-79. On Bombay: John Bumell, Bom-bay in the Days of Queen Anne: Being an Account of the Settlement Written by JohnBumell (1710) edited by Samuel Sheppard (Cambridge, U.K., 1933); Dulcinea CorreaRodrigues, Bombay Fort in the Eighteenth Century (Bombay, 1994), pp. 58-59, 72-115;S.M. Edwardes, The. Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect (Bombay, 1902), pp. 104-109, 138,146, 152-53, 170-78, 206, 229-238; GiUiam Tindatt, City of Gold: The Biography ofBombay (London, 1982); Meera Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and SocialEcology of a Colonial City (Stockholm, 1986); Dirk Kooiman, "Bombay: From FishingVillage to Colonial Port City (1662-1947)," in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp.207-30. Elsewhere in Asia see: Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila; The Context of HispanicUrbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 38-63; Leonard Blussfi," AnInsane Administration and an Unsanitary Town': The Dutch East India Company andBatavia (1619-1799)" in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 65-86; Remco Raben,"Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600-1800"(Ph.D. Dissertation, Rijkuniversiteit Leiden, 1996), pp. 162-247; Heather Sutherland;"Ethnicity, Wealth, and Power in Colonial Makassar: A Historiographical Reconsidera-tion," in Peter J. M. Nas, The Indonesian Gity; Studies in Urban Development and Planning(Dordrecht. Netherlands: Foris Publications, 1986), pp. 37-55.

On the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Anthony D. King, Urbanism. Colo-nialism, ar\d the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Formations of the World Urban System(London, 1990), pp. 41-42; King, "Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change," in Rossand Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 7-32; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colo-


nialLucknow. 1857-1877 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 27-144; MarkCrinson, Empire Building;Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London, 1996; Miriam Dossal, "Limits of ColonialUrban Planning: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Bombay," /ntemationai Journal ofUrban and Regional Research 13 (1989): 19-31; Dane Kennedy, Magic Mountains; HillStations and the British Ra; (Berkeley, 1996); Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Rela-tions and the Urhan Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur, 1996); DonaldB. Freeman, "Hill Stations or Horticulture ? Conflicting Imperial Visions of the CameronHighlands, Malaysia" Journal o/HistoricalCeografihy 25 (1999): 17-35; Anthony D. King,Colonial Urhan Development: Culture, Social Pouier, and Environment (London, 1976),pp. 180-276. Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat; Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, 1980);Gwendolyn Wright, "Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urban-ism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930," in Terxsions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in aBourgeois World ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 322-45;Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urhanism (Chicago, 1991); Paul Rabi-now, French-Modem; Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA, 1989),pp. 211-50; X. Cuilliaume, "Saigon, or the Failure of an Ambition (1858-1945)," inRoss and Telkamp, pp. 181-93; Raymond F. Betts, "Dakar, Ville Imperiale (1857-1960),"in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 193-206; Betts, "The Establishment of the Medina in Dakar,Senegal, 1914," Africa 41 (1971): 143-52; Elikia M'Bokolo, "Peste et Soci^t^ Urbaine &Dakar," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 85-86 (1982): 13-46; J.S. La Fontaine, City Politics;A Study ofLeopoldville, 1962-63 (Cambridge, UK, 1970), pp. 3-27; J. L. Miege, "Al-giers: Colonial Metropolis (1830-1961)," in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 171-80; Douglas L.Wheeler," 'Angola is Whose House?' Early Stirrings of Angolan Nationalism and Protest,1822-1910," African Historical Studies 2 (1969): 1-22; Colin C. Clarke, Kingston. Ja-maica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-1962 (Berkeley, 1975);EmaBrodber,A Study of the Yards in the City of Kingston (Mona, Jamaica, 1975); Aggrey Brown, Color.Class, and Politics in}amaica (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979). Sidney Chaloub, Cidade Febril:Cortigos e Epidemias na Corte Imperial (Sao Paulo, 1996); Teresa A. Meade, "Civilijjng"Rio; Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930 (University Park, PA, 1997);Donald H. J Clairmont, Africville: the Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community(Toronto, 1974); Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatoum; Racial Discourse in Canada,1875-1980 (Montreal, 1991); Anderson, "The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Placeand Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category," Annals of the Associationof American Geographers 77 (1987): 580-98; Anderson, "Place Narratives and the Ori-gins of Inner Sydney's Aboriginal Settlement, 1972-73," Journal of Historical Ceography19 (1993): 314-35.

7. Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwater-srand 1886-1914 (Johannesburg, 1982) vols. I and II; Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, andDeborah Posel, Apartheid's Cenesis 1935-1962 (Johannesburg, 1993); Rodney Daven-port, "African Townsmen? South African Native (Urban Areas) Legislation Throughthe Years," African Affairs 68 (1969) DT 1.R6; George Fredrickson, White Supremacy:A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, 1984); Robert HDavies, Capital, State and Labor in South Africa 1900-1960 (Brighton, 1979); MartinLegassick, "British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa, 1901-14," in Segregation and Apartheid in Tiventieth Century South Africa (London, 1995), ed.William Beinart and Saul Dubow; Bernard M. Magubane, The Making of a Racists State:British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875-1910 (Trenton, 1996); Shula Marksand Stanley Trapido, "Lord Milner and the South African State," in Working Papers inSouthern African Studies (Johannesburg, 1981), Philip Bonner, ed., vol II; Maynard Swan-son, "The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and the Urban Native Policy in theCape Colony," Journal of African History 18 (1977): 387-410; Swanson, " 'The Asiatic


Menace': Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870-1900," International Journal of AfricanHistorical Studies 16 (1983): 401-21; Anthony Lemon, ed.. Homes Apart: South Africa'sSegregated Cities (Cape Town, 1991); Alan Mabin, "Labour Capital, Class Struggle andthe Origins of Residential Segregation in Kimberley, 1880-1920," Jouma! of Historical Ge-ography 12 (1986): 4-26; Rob Turrell, "Kimberley: Labour and Compounds, 1871-1888,"Iruiustrialization and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, andConjciousness, 1870-1930 (London, 1982) ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, pp.45-76; Christopher C. Saunders, "The Creation of Ndabeni: Urban Segregation, So-cial Control, and African Resistance," unpublished paper in author's possession; VivianBickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Johannesburg,1995); A.J. Christopher, "From Flint to Soweto: Reflections on the Colonial Origins ofthe Apartheid City," Area 15 (1983): 145-49; Christopher, "Spatial Variations in theApplication of Residential Segregation in South African Cities," Geoforum 20: 253-67;Christopher, "Race and Residence in Colonial Port Elizabeth," South African Geographi-cal Journal 69 (1987); Christopher, "Roots of South African Segregation: South Africa atUnion," Journal o/Historical Geography 14 (1988): 151-69; Paul Maylam, "The Rise andDecline of Urban Apartheid in South Africa," African Affairs 89 (1990): 57-84; E.L. Nel,"Racial Segregation in East London, 1836-1948," South African Geographical Journal 73(1991); Sue M. Pamell, "Johannesburg Slums and Racial Segregation in South AfricanCities, 1910-37" (PhD. Dissertation: University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1993);Pamell, "Racial Segregation in Johannesburg: The Slums Act, 1934-39," South AfricanGeographical Journal 70 (1988); Pamell, Sanitation, Segregation and the Native (UrbanAreas) Act: African Exclusion from Johannesburg's Malay Location, 1897-1925," Journalo/Historical Geography 17 (1991): 271-88; Pamell, "Slums, Segregation and Poor Whitesin Johannesburg, 1920-1934," in White But Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whitesin Southern Africa, 1880-1940 (Pretoria, 1992), ed. Robert Morrell, pp.115-29; HarrietDeacon, "Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse in Nineteenth Century Cape Town,"Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1996): 287-308; Cary Baines, "The Origins of Ur-ban Segregation: Local Covemment and the Residence of Africans in Port Elizabeth, c.1835-1865," South African Historical Journal 22 (1990): 61-81; J. Robinson, "'A PerfectSystem of Control'? State Power and 'Native Locations' in South Africa," Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space 8: 135-62; Hilary Sapire, "African Settlement andSegregation in Brakpan, 1900-1927" in Holiing Their Cround: Class Locality and Cul-ture in I9th and 20th Centurji South Africa (Johannesburg, 1987) ed. Philip Bonner, IsabelHofmeyr, Deborah James, and Tom Lodge.

8. W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Millwood N.Y., 1973), pp. 10-45; CaryB. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840(Cambridge, MA, 1988); David Katzman, Be/ore the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the NineteenthCentury (Urbana, 1975); Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900(Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Theodore Hershberg, "Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadel-phia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freebom, and Socioeconomic Decline," in Hershberg. ed.,Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family ar\d Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (NewYork, 1981); Theodore Hershberg, Alan N. Burstein, Eugene P. Eriksen, Stephanie W.Creenberg, and William L. Yancey, "A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks, Immigrants, andOpportunity in Philadelphia, 1850-1880, 1930, 1970," in Hershberg, ed. Philadelphia,pp. 461-91; Harold X. Connolly, A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn (New York, 1977, pp. 1-50; John Daniels In Freedom's Birthplace (New York, 1969); James Oliver Horton and LoisE. Horton, Blacfc Bostoniaru; Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North(New York, 1979); George Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life arui Culture inUrhan America, 1750-1860 (New York, 1994); Gerald Gamm, Urhan Exodus: Why theJews Left and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Thomas J. Davis, "A Histor-


ical Overview of Black Buffalo, Work, Community, and Protest," in African Americansand the Rise of Buffalo's Post-lrviustrial City, 1940-Present Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., ed. (Buf-falo, 1990), pp. 8-47; Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (NewHaven, 1940); Spencer R. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysisof the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, NJ. 1860-1920 (New York, 1993);Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Vicky Dula, "The Black Residential Experience and Com-munity Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati," in Taylor, ed. Race and the City: Work,Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970 (Urbana, 1993), pp. 96-125; Asa E.Martin, Our Negro Population: A Sociological Study of the Negroes of Kansas City, Missouri(Original ed., 1913; by New York, 1969); Delores Nason McBroome, Parallel Commu-nities: African Americans in California's East Bay, 1850-1963 (New York, 1993); JamesBorchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City,1850-1970 (Urbana, 1980); Leroy Craham, Baltimore: the Nineteenth Century Black Cap-ital (New York, 1982); Howard N, Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, )865-1890 (New York, 1978); Howard Beeth and Cary D, Wintz, eds., "Introduction" to PartII: "Slavery and Freedom: Blacks in Nineteenth Century Houston," in Beeth and Wintz,ed. Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History ar\d Culture in Houston (College Station, TX, 1992);St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a NorthernCity (New York, 1945), pp. 31-64; Robert Cregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression:Philadelphia's Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890-1940 (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 1-20; 98-104; 147-222; Albert Spear, Blacfc Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1969), pp. 129-146; Cilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto,Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1963), pp. 127-49; Kusmer, A Chetto TakesShape: Black Cleveland, I870-I930 (Urbana, 1976); James R, Crossman, Land of Hope:Chicago: Black Southerners, and the Creat Migration (Chicago, 1989); Florette Henri, BlackMigration: Movement North, I900-I920 (Carden City, N.Y., 1975); Joe William Trotter,ed. The Creat Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, arui Gen-der (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant to Pittsburgh (NewYork, 1969); Elizabeth Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865-1900 (New York,1979); Kevin Boyle, Arc o/Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the J a ^ Age(New York, 2004).

9, Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C, 1996);Thomas E Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York, 1965); Fredrick-son, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Ox-ford, 1981), p. 49-50; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution ofa Worldview (Boulder, CO, 1993); Reginald Horsman, Race arui Manifest Destiny: TheOrigins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981); Rodney Davenportand Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modem History (New York, 2000), p, 77; JohnW, Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africaand the American South (Cambridge, UK, 1982); Arthur de Cobineau, The Inequality ofthe Human Races (L'Jnegalite des Races Humaines) tr. Adrian Collins ([1853] New York,1967), pp. 29-33, 90 (Cobineau also argued that European "races" attained supremacyby means of particular intermixtures, though). Herbert Spencer, "The Comparative Psy-chology of Man," (1876) in Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative (New York, 1910),pp. 351-70; Robert Knox, M.D. Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 145-46,

10. Kennedy, Magic Mountains, pp. 19-38, 117-47; Clifton C, Crais, " T h e VacantLand': The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa," Jour-nal of Social History, 25 (1991): 255-76; DuToit, A,, "No Chosen People: The Myth ofthe Calvinist Origin of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology," American Historical


Review 88 (1983): 920-52; Paul Rich, "Race, Science, and the Legitimation of WhiteSupremacy in South Africa, 1902-1940," International journal of African Historical Stud-ies, 23 (1990): 665-86.; Davenport, "African Townsmen?"

11. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in theWhite Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, J 8 J 7-i 914 (New York,1971); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and MassCulture in Nineteenth-Cenury America (London, 1990); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Cate:Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, 1998).

12. John Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination or Negroes a SubordinateRace, and (So-Called) Slavery Its Normal Condition; with an Appendix, Showing the Past andPresent Condition of the Countries South ofUs.(2nd ed New York, 1868, reprinted at NewYork, 1993), pp. 168-70.

13. Henry Woodfin Grady, "The New South," in The New South and Other Essays, ed.Edna Henry Lee Turpin (1904) (New York, 1969), pp. 35-36; Grady, "The South andHer Problems," in same collection, pp. 43-91; and "At The Boston Banquet," (1889), insame volume, pp. 92-123.

14. The following joint biography was pieced together from numerous sources. On Ma.-hool, see Wilbur F. Cole, "The Mayors of Baltimore: J. Barry Mahool," in Baltimore Mu-nicipal Journal Aug. 27,1919, pp. 2-3. On Dashiell, see Distinguished Men of Baltimore ando/Maryland (Baltimore, 1914), p. 66. Biographical information is scarce on West. SeeBaltimore Sun Dec 20 1910 p.7; his plantation roots are suggested in a letter to MayorPreston from August 7, 1913 in Baltimore City Archives, Preston Files, #21-d. On EdgarAllen Poe, see History of Maryland from its Founding as a Town to the Current Year, 1729-1890 (n. pi.: S.B. Nelson, 1898), pp. 691-92; and Sun Dec. 18, 1910, p.7. On WilliamLuke Marbury, Sr., see William Luke Marbury Jr., In the Catbird Seat (Baltimore, 1988),chapters 2 ,3 ,5 . On the relationship of Marbury and Bruce, see William Cabell Bruce, Se-lections from the Speeches, Addresses and Political Writings ofWm. Cabell Bruce (Baltimore,1927), p. 60. On Grasty, see Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, and H.L. Mencken, andHamilton Owens, The Sunpapers o/Baltimore (New York, 1937), pp. 285-339; Harold A.Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837-1987 (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 125-63; Daniel W. Pfaff,"Charles H. Grasty," in American Newspaper Journalists, 1901-1925 (Detroit, 1984), ed.Perry J. Ashley, pp. 93-97.

15. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge,MA, 1998), pp. 52-75; illustration facing p. 208.

16. Marbury, Jr., CatfeirdSeat, pp. 51,321. For two examples of Sun editorials, see "Peaceand Good-Will Between the Races," July 10, 1910, p. 6; and "Duty of the United Statesin Respect to Nicaragua," July 13, 1910, p. 6.

17. Letter from Edgar Allen Poe to Mayor J. Barry Mahool, December 17, 1910, BCAMahool Files, 451. Also in Sun Dec 18, 1910, p. 7.

18. In an address to an elite Baltimore boys' school in the all-white Baltimore suburbof Roland Park, Bruce remembered with fondness the days of his youth on his father'splantation when he played rollicking games with black boys his age without any sense ofantagonism, and when blacks knew their place so well it was even comforting that when"you met a person on one of its roads, the chances were as about 500 to 25 that it was aperson of African descent." Bruce, "Address to the Boys of the Gilman Country School,


Baltimore, Md., May 19,1912," in Bruce, Selectior\s. p. 86. In his later years, he retired toa "venerable home" in rural Ruxton, Maryland. Marbury remained a city dweller, thoughhis family took vacations on his family's estate in Southern Maryland. He also served onthe board of a Farm for the Colored Insane nearby on another old plantation where "partof the cure" for the racial and mental condition of the unfortunate inmates consistedin the facility's "favorable climate" and the "proper occupation" it offered them, pickingand weaving basket palms. Baltimore Sun, Dec 11, 1910, p. 6.

19. For an example, see Boger, "Shifting Ground," p. 20.

20. William Cabell Baice, The Negro Problem (Baltimore, 1891), pp. 4, 13-14, 20, 31.

21. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908(Chapel Hill, 2001), pp. 254-56; David Skillen Bogen, "Predecessors of Rosa Parks:Maryland Transportation Cases Between the Civil War and the Beginning of WorldWar I," University of Maryland School of Law, Legal Studies Research Papers No. 2004-16; from Social Science Research Network Electronic Papers Collection, http//ssm.com/abstract=570082: 17-22; "Will Oppose 'Jim Crow' Cars," A/ro-American Ledger, April 4,1914, p. 1.

22. All of the most prominent white supporters of the West Ordinance were associatedwith reform wing of the Democratic Party. Marbury had made his local reputation in histwenties by giving a speech against the machine in front of a decidedly hostile crowd.Grasty had authorized damning exposes of the machine as editor of the Baltimore News,and Marbury later successfully defended Grasty in a defamation suit resulting from hismuckraking. A stint as State Attorney General followed for Marbury, and it was soonafter that that he was being bruited as a candidate for U.S. Senate. Then he cast his lotwith Maryland's ill-fated disfranchisement campaigns. At the University of Maryland,Marbury and Bruce had been taught by John Prentiss Poe, father of Edgar Allen Poe,the city solicitor. Bruce later wrote a laudatory address about Poe including him among"Seven Great Maryland Lawyers," though there must have been some tension when Poedrafted the state's first disfranchisement amendment, which included the language thatwould have cut into reformers' support. Marbury later helped write the second of Mary-land's proposed disfranchisement bills, the Strauss Amendment, which he designed toshore up reformers' political standing. Grasty's News dutifully printed Marbury's argu-ments for the measure in 1908. By the time of the West Ordinance, though, all of thesecampaigns had come to naught, though in court, Marbury continued to defend a dis-franchisement bill passed by the city of Annapolis. Marbury's arguments for the Straussamendment are in the Baltimore News, February 12, 1908, p. 12. Later, as editor of theSun, Grasty published Marbury's argument in the Annapolis disfranchisement case inwhich he used John Prentiss Poe's contention that the Fifteenth Amendment was in-valid because of the way it was ratified without the approval of Southern states. Sun,October 12, 1910, p. 5.

23. Addresses for Mahool, Preston, Grasty, and Bruce from Folk's Balrimore, City Di-rectory (Richmond, 1909). On Grasty's role in Roland Park, see below. Also, James F.Waesche, Crowning the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland Dis-trict (Baltimore, 1987,) p. 54; and Roberta Mouldry, "Gardens, Houses, and People: ThePlanning of Roland Park, Baltimore" (Master Thesis, Cornell University, 1990), p. 281.

24. Sherry L. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of An American City (Baltimore, 1997),pp. 270-78; Garrett Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," pp. 18-19. On the designation


"favored fan" for the Northwest Side see James F. Waesche, Crotming the Gravelly Hill:A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland District (Baltimore, 1987), p. 26.

25. "Negro Invasion Opposed," Baltimore Sun July 6, 1910 p.7; The Sun ran front-pagecoverage of the Johnson-Jeffries fight on July 5, and had numerous articles about Mahool'sefforts to stop the newsreels during the month. Biographical information on Hawkinsfrom NAACP Branch Files, Baltimore Md, 1914-1930, microfilm slide 00855.

26. Grace Elizaheth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South1890-1940 (New York, 1998), pp. 121-99. John Cell also makes an argument ahout theurban origins of Jim Crow in The Highest Stage of White Supremacy.

11. "The West Ordinance," Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6. On complaints about working-classwhite rioting, see Sun, Dec 18, 1910, p. 7; Sun April 7, 1911; resolution of North Balti-more Improvement Association in favor of a new segregation law to avoid "racial conflictsreplete with disorder," BCA, Preston Files 21-D Apr 26, 1913; The mayor of Roanoke,Virginia perceived a similar dynamic in his city. "The negroes show a disposition to en-croach upon white sections continually, and while the best class of whites are powerless,as they seem to think, there is another class which takes the law into their own handsand run undesirable people out of their section." BCA, Mahool Files 404, Dec. 17 1910.

28. Preston Files 21'D June 3, 1918.

29. When it got out that McMechen had moved in to the neighborhood in celebrationof his admission to the state bar, the Sun ridiculed this overreaching as behavior typicalof 'uppity negroes.' Dashiell appears to have taken on the Ordinance project largely forprofessional reasons—as Gretchen Boger has shown, he was a renter in the neighbor-hood, so he did not have real estate interests at risk. Later he wrote a letter imploringMayor Mahool to let him have the pen used to sign the Ordinance as a talisman of pro-fessional success (in the event, Mahool used two pens, so he could give one to West aswell). Hawkins later snorted that Dashiell, who did not have formal training like him-self, was a "lawyer without brief" in an article in the NAACP's Crisis, noting that thecourts had quickly dismissed his version of the law on obvious technical grounds, requir-ing the intervention of the more experienced William Marbury. As if in response, theSun offered this backhanded swipe at the NAACP and its officers: "The best and mostrespectable members of the colored race have no desire to leave their own people andmingle with white people. It is only the aggressive ones who are ever on the lookoutfor trouble, who wish to obtrude where they are not welcome." "The West Ordinance,"editorial in the Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1911, p. 6. Hawkins, "Year of Segregation," p. 28.The Sun by contrast did everything it could to enhance Dashiell and West's reputation,fussing at length over their legislative victory and noting that each claimed trophies fromthe exploits: Dashiell got the pen Mahool used to sign the Ordinance, and West got aframed copy of the law. Letter from Edgar Allen Poe to Mayor J. Barry Mahool, Decem-ber 17, 1910, BCA Mahool Files, 451. p. 2. Sun, Dec 18, 1910, p. 7. Marbury probablyhad the greatest professional stake in his residence in the neighborhood. His home at159 West Lanvale Street, a few blocks east of McMechen's new house, was known asone of the larger houses in the community. Because it was located nearer to the center oftown than other elite neighborhoods it had become a kind of nerve-center of progressiveDemocratic politics—the editorial page editor of the Sun was also a regular visitor—andwas almost certainly a meeting place for the leaders of the campaign to pass the WestOrdinance. Looking back many years later Marbury's son writes of the place with enor-mous nostalgia, as a meeting place for his entire extended clan and all the children of


the neighborhood as well as city politicos. Race conflict thus threatened the very bosomof a deeply nurtured sense of home as a professional asset. For years after the failure ofthe West Ordinance, the elder Marbury remained in the neighborhood, even sending hisson through the streets to his neighbors' houses to get them to put restrictive covenantsin their housing deeds barring them from selling to negroes. Marbury, Jr., Catbird Seat,pp. 29-37; 321. Polk's Baltimore City Directory for 1929 lists Marbury at the same WestLanvale Street address.

30. "Against Negro School," Sun, Oct. 13, 1910, p. 14.

31. The fight and ensuing riots were covered on the front page of the Sun, July 5, 1910,and Mahool's action to stop showing the films was reported on July 6, 1910, p. 6. On July8, 1910, p. 6 the paper reassured whites in its editorial page that blacks have accompishednothing without tutelage of whites, so black preachers should not gloat over the victory.It cited Charles Frances Adams on his trip to Africa. The paper also printed a dispatchfrom Britain warning Americans to "keep check on blacks is necessary" after the fight,on July 7, 1910, p. 7, and a note that the fight films had also been suppressed in London(July 13, p. 13).

32. Petitions from Harlem Improvement Association, June 5, 1913, and from NorthBaltimore Improvement Association, May 17th, 1913; letter from C. E. Stonebraker (fullname Cora E. Stonebraker listed in Polk's Baltimore 1909 as the owner of Howard NoveltyCo.) to Mayor Preston, May 12, 1913, all documents in Preston Files 21-D.

33. Letter from "R." to Sun, May 15, 1918; and letter from Alice J. Reilley to MayorPreston, July 21, 1918, Preston Files, 106.

34. Quote is from the title of an editorial "The Segregation Ordinance Should BringPeace," in the Sun, September 27, 1913, p. 8. For more on this sentiment, see "TheWest Ordinance" Sun, October 10,1910, p. 6; "Strong for West Plan," Sun, October 11,1910, p. 16; "The West Ordinance Constitutional" Sun December 20, 1910, p. 6; and"Segregation in Force," same date, p. 7, "The West Ordinance," Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6.Edgar Allen Poe's analysis of the ordinance is dated December 17, 1910, in Mahool Files,451.

35. On the origins of these ideas in late-eighteenth century London see Robert Fishman,Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), pp. 51-72. Racializedlanguage was even used in campaigns for urban reform in mid to late nineteenth-centuryLondon, as when the poorer East End was compared to "darkest Africa." See AndrewLees, Cities Perceived: Urban Societal in European arui American Thought (New York, 1985),pp. 109-110; Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), pp. 60, 111, 325-26. On asimilar theme, the "theory of urban degeneration," see Carth Steadman-Jones, OutcastLomion: A Study in the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian Society (London, 1971),pp. 127-51.

On the earliest use of racial segregation to solve urban problems in India, see Nightin-gale, "Urban and Global Dynamics of Color Lines;" P.J. Marshall, "British Society in In-dia under the East India Company," Mociem Asian Studies 31 (1997): 89-108; and "TheWhite Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company," Modem AiSianStudies 34 (2000): 307-31. In her excellent "Colonial Companions: Bibis, Begums, andConcubines of the British in North India, 1760-1830" (Ph.D Dissertation, Universityof California at Berkeley, 2000), Durba Ghosh argues that sentiments against unions be-tween British upper class men and Indian women, as well as their children had souredwell before Cornwallis.

THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OE URBAN SEGREGATION 697

36, See for example, Sherry H, Olsen, Baltimore; The Buildingofan American City (Balti-more, 1997), pp, 269-79; Garret Power, "Apartheid Baltimore-Style," pp, 292-97, 301-303; Samuel Roberts, "Contagious Fear," p, 307 and chapter 8 as a whole,

37, Sun, Sept 27, 1913, p, 8,

38, The literature on the medical profession and its fight against urban disease is vast.Here are some works 1 have relied on, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class Under theRaj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793-1905 (London, 1980); DavidArnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-CenturyIndia (Berkeley, 1994); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race ar\d Politics: Policing VenerealDisease in the British Empire (New York, 2000); Mark Harrison, Public Health in BritishIndia: Angb-Indian Preventative Medicine J859-J9I4 (Cambridge, UK, 1994); WarwickAnderson, "Excremental Colonialism, Public Health, and the Politics of Polution," Crit-ical Inquiry 21 (1995): 640-69; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History ofColonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Houndmills, UK, 2004); Vijay Prashad, "Na-tive Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the Morbid Resolutions of Moder-nity," Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994): 243-60; Peter Baldwin, Contagion arxd theState in Europe, J 830-1930 (Cambridge, UK, 1999); Charles Rosenburg, Explaining Epi-demics, And Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge, UK, 1994); ReynaldoIUeto, "Cholera and the Origins of American Sanitary Order in the Philippines," in Dis-crepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente Rafael (Philadelphia,1995), pp, 51-82.

39, The use of health arguments to segregate colonial cities is discussed in King, ColonialUrban Development, pp. 180-276; Oldenburg, Cobnial Lucknow, pp, 27-144; Kennedy,Magic Mountains; Yeoh, Contesting Space; Maynard Swanson, "The Sanitation Syn-drome"; Swanson, " 'The Asiatic Menace'"; Pamell, "Sanitation, Segregation, and theNative (Urban Areas) Act"; Harriet Deacon, "Racial Segregation and Medical Dis-course"; Frenkel and Western, "Pretext or Prophylaxis?"; Cale, "Segregation in BritishWest Africa"; Curtin, "Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning"; John W, Cell, "Med-ical Theory and the Origins of Segregation," 307-35; Abu-Lughod, Ratat; GwendolynWright, "Tradition in the Service of Modernity; Wright, Politics of Design; Betts, "TheEstablishment of the Medina in Dakar"; M'Bokolo, "Peste et Soci^t^ Urbaine & Dakar";Sidney Chaloub, Cidade Febril; Teresa A. Meade, "Civilizing" Rio; Nayan Shah, Conta-gious Divides,- Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatowm (Berkeley, 2001); SamuelRoberts, "Infectious Fear: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and the Logic of Race and Illnessin Baltimore, Maryland, 1880-1930" (Ph,D Dissertation: Princeton University, 2002);David McBride, From Tuberculosis to AIDS: Epidemics Among Urban Blacks Since 1900(Albany, 1991); Vanessa Gamble, Germs Have No Color Line; Blacks and American Medi-cine, 1900-1940 (New York, 1989); William Deverell, "Plague in Los Angeles: Ethnic-ity and Typicality," in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed, Valerie Mat-sumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley, 1999), p, 172-200. On South Africa, seeGary Baines, "The Origins of Urban Segregation"; Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome";Swanson, " 'The Asiatic Menace'; Deacon, "Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse;Bickford-Smith, Victorian Cape Town. On Johannesburg, see Parnell, "JohannesburgSlums"; and Pamell, "Sanitation, Segregation and the Native (Urban Areas) Act."

40, Shah, Conta^ous Divides pp, 71-73.

41, See E,W. Gilliam, The African in the United States" (1883), Popular Science Monthly22 (February, 1883): 438-40; and Gilliam, "The African Problem," North American Re-view 139 (1884): 417-44; Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American


Negro New York, 1896), 314,328; William Lee Howard, "The Negro as a Distinct EthnicFactor in Civilization," Medicine 9 (1903): 423-26.

42. Herman M. Biggs, address in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress ofBaltimore, MD (Baltimore, 1911), p. 1; Roberts, "Infectious Fear," pp. 278-79; quotefrom Jones, p. 301.

43. See, for example, BCA, Preston Files 21-d, letter from Rev WJ. MacMillan, January18, 1916, and letter from Alice Reilly, July 2, 1918.

44. Marbury Jr., CathirdSeat, pp. 32-33; Roberts, "Infectious Fear," pp. 235-36; 253-56;Mayor Preston himself articulated these concerns in an article "What Can Be Done toImprove the Living Conditions of Baltimore's Negro Population?" Baltimore MunicipalJournal, March 16, 1917, p. 1.

45. H.L. Mencken, The Free Lance (unpublished collection of essays from 1911-1915 inMencken Room, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore), p. 137. Quoted in Garret Power,"Apartheid Baltimore Style," p. 307.

46. See Janet Kemp, Housing Conditioas in Baltimore (Baltimore, 1907), pp. 18-19; Will-iam W. Emmart, "City Plan, " in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress ofBaltimore, Md. (Baltimore, 1911), pp. 134-35; William Welch "Sanitation in Relationto the Poor" (1892), in Papers and Addresses by William Henry Welch ed. Walter C. Burkett(Baltimore, 1920), pp. 594-98.

47. On American courts' obstacles to the importation of European slum-clearance andpublic housing schemes see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 201-208.

48. William M. Emmart, "City Plan," p. 129. Most historians of the Congress agree thatthe segregation ordinance was not discussed there. This passage is the closest anyonemade direct reference to the law and to Northwest Side residents' concerns with decliningproperty values. Emmart's home address in 1909 was 817 N. Fremont Ave., more or lessright on the racial frontier {Polk's Baltimore City Directory, 1909). The scheme wouldhave also probably involved some "excess condemnation" of properties adjacent to theproposed avenues in order to give the City land which could be resold at increased priceafter the projects' completion and could help in its financing. American courts tendedto disallow this sort of planning device too. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings pp 201-208.

49. "Ordinance Should Bring Peace," Sun, Sept. 27, 1913, p. 8.

50. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 461-68; 473-79.

51. "Segregation Opposed: Socialists Plead for the Negro," Baltimore Sun, October 4,1910. At the time of the Ordinance "congestion" had become the key enemy for housingreformers across the country. Yet there is no evidence that Baltimore's white housingreformers responded to testimony given by several African Americans at a public hearingheld by the City Council's Committee on Police and Jail that the Segregation Ordinancewould increase congestion in black areas. Afro American Ledger, October 29, 1910, p. 4.

52. Addresses at City-Wide Congress, pp. 3-8.

53. Letter from Reverend William J. MacMillan to Mayor Preston, Jan. 18, 1916, PF106.


54, Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987),pp, 51-72, Quote from Lees, Cities Perceived, pp, 109-110; Briggs, Victorian Cities, pp,60, 111,325-26, On a similar theme, the "theory of urban degeneration," see Steadman-Jones, Outcast London, pp, 127-51,

55, Nield, "Growth of a Colonial City," pp. 309-36; Robert Archer, "Colonial Suburbsin South Asia, 1700-1850 and the Spaces of Modernity," in Visions of Suburbia ed, RogerSilverstone, (London, 1973) pp, 26-54; Swati Chattopadhyay, "Blurring Boundaries: TheLimits of'White Town' in Colonial Calcutta," Journal of the Society of Architectural His-torians 59 (2000): 160,

56, James F, Waesche, Crouming the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-GuilfordHomeland District (Baltimore, 1987), p, 26. On Brooklyn Heights and Cambridge, seeKenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford,1985), pp. 20-31, As late as the 1910s, the Sun declared that in Baltimore's Mount Ver-non Place neighborhood, not far from the Northwest Side the high housing values aloneprotected the neighborhood from black infiltration. Sun April 7,1911, p. 6. This was not,apparently the feeling of the developers of Roland Park, which was further out and moreexpensive, but who nevertheless added restrictive covenants against selling property toblacks to newer developments around this time.

57, Racial ideologies and cultural chauvinism amplified the class and gender segrega-tion that underlay middle-class English people's desire to live on urban fringes in India,Houses in white town were worth much more than in black town, even when the grandpalaces of the wealthiest Indians were compared with those of their closest British coun-terparts. Early nineteenth-century advertisements for houses in White Town often toutedtheir location near the residences of prominent Englishmen, Chattopadhyay, "BlurringBoundaries," pp, 159-60 and 178, note 30. According to Pradip Sinha, some Englishmenwere puzzled that wealthy Indians in Calcutta's black town seemed to see it as a sign ofprestige if their palaces were surrounded by teeming, thatch-roofed bustees (slums) in-habited by poor servants, clients, and political faction followers—those in charge of san-itation and fire safety were especially dismayed. Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History, p, 28,notes 49 and 50, The novelist Sara Jeanette Duncan wryly but realistically narrates thestory of a modest British couple in search of a house in Calcutta in The Simple Adventuresof a Memsahib ([1893] Ottawa, 1986), She notes that the Brownes were "lucky" in thatthey found "a house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had survivedfor several years," She also later notes that the house was across the street from a bus-tee, whose "proximity does not enhance rents" (pp. 54, 162), But, no matter how muchEnglishmen may have insisted upon racial segregation. Englishmen themselves lived sur-rounded by armies of Indian servants—even modest households in Calcutta could haveover a hundred. Residential separation in colonial India was more permeable than any-where else, and as Duncan suggests, bustees housing these domestic retinues often grewup in White Town too, despite repeated demolition efforts. Also, Indians who could andoften did buy property in white area often did so because they were comfortable with Eu-ropeans' own violations of caste traditions and were eager to adopt Western ways. Giventheir wealth, they would also most likely raise surrounding property values, Veena Old-enburg, Colonial Lucknow, p. 176, In Hill Stations, as Pamela Kanwar has shown, thesituation was somewhat different, as the need for Indian servants and builders swelledthe Indian population and as Indian Princes sought to acquire luxury properties in thebooming real estate markets of places like Simla, Kanwar, "The Changing Profile of theSummer Capital of British India: Simla 1864-1947," Modem Asian Studies, 18 (1984):pp, 228-36,


58. Kanwar, "Changing Profile," p.225. On West Africa, see Curtin, "Medical Knowl-edge," pp. 600-605.

59. Susan Parnell, "Sanitation, Segregation, and the Natives (Urban Areas Act)," p.272. Black property owners continued to press their claims in such famous "freehold"townships as Sophiatown into the 1950s, when the apartheid regime ended them en-tirely. Suburban developers in Johannesburg and elsewhere apparently used restrictivecovenants as early as the 1890s, and they were virtually universal after 1912. We knowlittle about the ideologies employed in pushing these covenants, but presumably concernsabout property values were critical. See Keith S. O. Beavon, Johannesburg: The Makingand Shaping of the City (Pretoria, 2004), pp. 103, 128-33; Lemon, ed.. Homes Apart, pp.3, 46, 78, 92, 176-77, 181; Christopher, "Spatial Variations."

60. Quotes from "Negro Invasion Opposed" Sun July 6, 1910, p. 7; and "The West Or-dinance" editorial in the Sun, October 10, 1910, p. 6. For other references to propertyvalues see Property see Sun Oct. 4, 1910; PF 21-d June 12 1913, June 14; PF 21 d Aug14th; PF21-d Jan 18 1916.

61. "Strong for West Plan," Sun, Oct 11, 1910, p. 16.

62. Letters to the Sun, October 2, 1910, p. 6, and October 7, 1910, p. 6.

63. Editorial in Sun, May 15, 1911, p. 6.

64. Letters to Mayor Preston from Charles M. Childs, 1142 Myrtle Ave., Jan. 24, 1918,PF 106; and from Mrs. A J ReiUy, 1008 Lafayette Ave., June 16, 1913, PF 21-D.

65. This sample is somewhat unscientific but I believe it is useful nonetheless. It wasderived from everyone who I could find who were reported by the Sun and the News asspeaking out publically in favor of the Ordinance, all signers of petitions and officers ofNeighborhood Organizations behind those petitions, and all writers of letters pertainingto the Ordinance to the offices of Mayors Mahool and Preston during their full terms,dating from 1910 to 1918.1 did not include the large numbers of Lafayette Street residentswho petitioned Mayor Preston on June 3, 1918 (PF 106) to have the black residents of ahouse nearby removed because of alleged pistol shots that came from the house, thoughmany of the names appear elsewhere in petitions clearly focused on the Ordinance itself.

Of eighty names, the names or professions of 12 were not listed in the Polk's BaltimoreCity Directory in 1909. Fourteen were attorneys; 11 were secretaries or clerks; 10 weremedium-sized business owners; 5 were shop owners; 6 were physicians; 2 were pastors orpriests; and 10 were in a miscellaneous category. There were 8 women in the group, someof whom are included among those owning shops or boarding houses, but most of whomwere not listed in the directory. Only two of the eighty were real estate agents.

66. The arguments are based on the home street addresses listed in Polk's Baltimore CityDirectory, 1909 of all the Offices and Executive Committee members of the City Wide-Congress, as listed in the Addresses Delivered at the City Wide Congress. The professionsalso listed in the directory attest to the fact that these figures included some of Baltimore'smost important industrialists, downtown businessmen, and they of course included bothpolitical figures like William Cabell Bruce and world-renowned academics like WilliamWelch.

67. Letter from Reverend William McMillan to Mayor Preston, January 18,1916, in PF106


68. Letter from Harry T. Giesendaffer, Real Estate Broker, to Mayor Mahool, Dec. 10,1910, BCA, Mahool Files, 451, p. 2. See also letters from Charles Otto, John M. Hering,Franklin F. Johnson, J.I. Coldstein, and the Realty Securities Corporation in the samefile.

69. On Roland Park, see Roberta Mouldry, "Gardens, Houses, and People." Grasty's roleis described in Daniel W. Pfaff, "Charles H. Grasty," in American Newspaper Journalists1901-25, ed. Perry J. Ashley (Detroit, 1984), p. 93. The exchange between Preston, hisChicago friend, A.K. Warner, and the Real Estate Board of Baltimore can be found in PF106.

70. Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," 312-13.

71. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 153, 173.

72. The phrase "average opinion about what the average opinion will be" is John May-nard Keynes's, describing the "herd" mentality of unregulated speculative currency mar-kets.

73. Carl Nightingale, "A Tale of Three Global Ghettos," Journal of Urban History 29(2003): 243-57; Brahim Chanchabi, with Catherine de Withol de Wenden, Cite's et Di-versitis: L'lmmigration en Europe (Paris, 1995); Peter Hall, "The Inner City Worldwide,"in The Inner City in Context: The Final Report of the Social Sciences Research Council InnerCities Working Part> ed. Peter Hall (London, 1981); John Rex, The Ghetto and Under-class: Essays on Race and Social Policy (Aldershot, UK, 1988); Susan J. Smith, "Residen-tial Segregation and the Politics of Racialization, " in Racism, the City and the State ed.Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (London, 1993), pp. 128-43; Loic J.D. Wacquant,"The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications," Acta Sodo-logica 39 (1996): 122-39; Wacquant, "Banlieues Franf aises et le Ghetto Noir Americain:de l'Amalgame ei la Comparaison," French Politics and Society, 10 no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 81-103; Wacquant, "Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghettoand the French Urban Periphery," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17no. 3 (1993): 366-83; Wacquant, "The Comparative Structure and Experience of Ur-ban Exclusion: 'Race,' Class, and Space in Chicago and Paris," in Poverty, Inequalit)i, ar\dthe Future of Social Policy: Western States and the New World Order ed. Katherine Mc-Fate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson (New York, 1995), pp. 543-70; Adil Ja-zouli, Les Anne'es Banlieues (Paris, 1992), pp. 17-63; Herve Vieillard-Baron, Les BanlieuesFranfaises; ou le Chetto Impossible (n.p.,: Editions de l'Aube, 1994); Francois Dubet andDidier Lapeyronnie, Les Qtiartiers d'Exil (Paris, 1992); Sophie Body-Gendrot, "Migrationand the Racialization of the Postmodern City in France," in Cross and Keith, Racism, theCity and the State, pp. 77-92; Enzo Mingione, "Urban Poverty in the Advanced IndustrialWorld: Concepts, Analysis and Debates," in Urban Poverty and the Ur\derclass: A Readered. Mingione, pp. 3-40; Nick Buck, "Social and Economic Change in ContemporaryBritain: the Emergence of an Urban Underclass?" in Mingione Urban Poverty, pp. 277-98; Hartmut Hausserman, Andreas Kappha, and Rainer Muenz, "Berlin: Immigration,Social Problems, Political Approaches," unpublished paper delivered at the InternationalSymposium on Social Exclusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996;Hartmut Haussermann, "Social Transformation of Urban Space in Berlin Since 1960,"unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion andthe "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Jens S. Dangschat and David Fasen-fest, "(Re)Structuring Urban Poverty: The Impact of Globalization on its Extent andConcentration," unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on SocialExclusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Christian Kesteloot, "La


Probl^matique de l'lnt^gration des Jeunes Urbains: Une Analyse Gfiographique du CasBruxellois," unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Ex-clusion and the "New Urban Underclass," Berlin June, 1996; Sophie Watson, "Work andLeisure in Tomorrow's Cities," in Beyond the Market: Alternatives to Economic Rationalism,eds. Stuart Rees, Gordon Rodley and Frank Stilwell (Sydney, pp. 11-12; see also MarkPeel, "The Urban Debate: From 'Los Angeles' to the Urban Village," in Australian Cities:Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia ed. Patrick Troy (Hong Kong, 1995), pp.39-40.

Before Race Mattered:Geographies of the Color Line in

Early Colonial Madras and New York

CARL H. NIGHTINGALE

BY THE 1710S, BRITISH AUTHORITIES AT BOTH MADRAS, INDIA, and New York City hadmade, by fits and starts, more than a half-century of progress in their efforts toincrease their power over people they categorized as “black.” Yet the residentialcolor lines they drew in these two cities contrasted sharply. In Madras, known todayas Chennai, stout stone walls separated a privileged European neighborhood fromthe city’s Asian districts. Similar arrangements existed in other colonial cities in theEastern Hemisphere, but Madras was the first place in world history to officiallydesignate its two sections by color: “White Town” and “Black Town.” In New York,by contrast, a small part of town outside the city wall sometimes called the “negrolands” was dismantled, along with the wall itself. In a pattern that New Yorkerswould scarcely recognize today, but which was common among slave-importing citiesof the Atlantic world, authorities forced black slaves to live inside the householdsof whites, especially the wealthiest ones. There, the politics of domestic life settledfurther questions of color and space.

What can we learn from juxtaposing these tales of two cities on opposite sidesof the world? Read together, they tell us much about the ties between ventures ofEuropean expansion in the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and about the citiesthat anchored many of those ventures. They also allow us to explore the intellectual,political, and institutional emergence of color lines not only in their commonly as-sumed Atlantic birthplace, but also in the Indian Ocean, where much less is knownabout their earlier years.1 Around the turn of the eighteenth century, some Europeancolonial officials in both hemispheres reassessed the categories of human differencethey deemed most useful to their political projects, and turned increasingly to color

The author wishes to express his deep gratitude to Peter J. Marshall, Eugene F. Irschick, Durba Ghosh,Leonard Blusse, Remco Raben, Aims McGuinness, Robert O. Self, Peter Silver, Daniel T. Rodgers,Pradip Sinha, Eric Seeman, Martha T. McCluskey, and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR for theirhelp in encouraging and sharpening this essay.

1 “Perhaps more than any other set of ideas, race was Atlantic,” writes Joyce Chaplin, and by theircollective choice of research topics and approaches, historians have made this statement so. Chaplin,“Race,” in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London,2002), 154. While the academic debate on the role of “race” in the origins of Atlantic slavery is enormousand so well-known as to make its citation unnecessary here, historians have done little, for example, toexplore the role of concepts of difference in the making of the early modern British Empire in Asia—even though race and civilization are key aspects of work on the empire from the late eighteenth centuryon.

48

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concepts such as “black” and “white,” even if they still showed little interest in theidea of “race.” The inspiration for telling the stories of Madras and New York along-side each other comes from historians who approach comparative topics by high-lighting connections between different parts of the world, and more specifically bycalls to reframe the “Atlantic world” in larger contexts.2 But such transnational andtrans-hemispheric perspectives also help us scrutinize the real extent of larger con-nective changes. Were keywords, ideas, politics, and institutions of colony-buildingactually exported successfully from one part of the world to another, or did barriersoperating within overlapping hemispheric, oceanic, continental, imperial, regional,urban, neighborhood, or even smaller geographies prevent or alter such long-dis-tance trade?

Such an approach treats colonial cities as continually changing participants inlarger-scale historical transformations—not subject to time-freezing typologies, asthey often are. Certainly, no single geographic structure marked “the colonial city,”as some scholars of Asian and African urban segregation have argued.3 Instead,colonial urban authorities sought to restrict the movement and residence of theirsubjects using changing ranges of policies that involved both large-scale neighbor-hood division and forced co-residence. Explaining the policy mixes and priorities inany given colonial city at any time requires us to highlight the contingencies of po-litical dramas that unfolded on various geographic scales.

As in all early modern colonial cities, officials in both Madras (founded in 1639–1640) and New York (founded as New Amsterdam in 1624–1626) were forced tocontinuously engage in diplomacy and war with local governments and rival Euro-pean imperial enterprises. They also simultaneously contended with restive, polyglotlocal populations, who often violently resisted colonial rule and used urban spacein transgressive ways. Indeed, spatial politics in Madras and New York took shapeoverwhelmingly in the context of concerns about urban defense and social control.Of course, quests for profit, commercial monopoly, and control over labor and landundergirded much of the colonial urban enterprise, but in residential matters, eveneconomic concerns were sometimes subordinated to political and geopolitical im-peratives. Other questions that became so important to modern urban structure,such as moral improvement and urban sanitation, had much less impact on the resi-dential policies of the two cities during this earlier period.4

At the same time, the politics of urban defense and control in colonial cities wasalso contingent upon well-known hemispheric differences in the contexts of colo-nization. In Madras, the focus on residential separation reflected a genre of urban

2 Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World Island, and the Idea of AtlanticHistory,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 169–182; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Eric Seeman,eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2007); Alison Games, “Beyondthe Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rdser., 62, no. 4 (2006): 675–692; Philip J. Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons andConnections,” ibid., 693–712; and Peter A. Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” ibid., 725–742.

3 Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London,1976), 16–17, 39–40; King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foun-dations of the World Urban System (London, 1990), 35–37.

4 On questions of moral reform and segregation in a transnational context, see Carl H. Nightingale,“The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation,” Journal ofSocial History 39, no. 3 (2006): 667–702.

Before Race Mattered 49

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politics that had precedents in early New Spain and Portuguese West Africa and hadtraveled to the East. There, separation policies became more permanently estab-lished in a context in which colonialism was limited to seaborne trade, urban out-posts, and often ambiguous power balances between itinerant European agents andlocal merchants and rulers. In the New World, where large-scale settler and plan-tation colonialism was possible, interest in large-scale urban separation schemeswaned. Instead, colonial authorities in New York and in cities across the Americasprioritized policies of forced co-residence long associated with urban slaveholding.

As authorities in Madras and New York mobilized support for their contrastingpolicies of residential restriction, they drew heavily on contemporary concepts ofhuman difference. In the official records from the two cities, a striking similarityemerges in these otherwise very different places. In both Madras and New York,almost simultaneously at the turn of the eighteenth century, a dichotomous colorpolitics, involving a prioritization of polarized concepts of “black” and “white,” be-gan to dominate authorities’ pronouncements. When these official sources are readthrough trans-hemispheric lenses, a crisscrossing transoceanic trade in urban po-litical ideas emerges. Residential policies traveled for the most part within separatehemispheres, from one empire to another. By contrast, the black-white dichotomybecame a trans-hemispheric phenomenon, traded principally within a single empire,the British one. Still, hemispheric and local contingencies mattered in the inventionof urban color politics, for British authorities in West and East defined “black” and“white” differently and used it for different purposes. In Madras, the need to appeasea particular constellation of foreign Asian merchant communities led to the firstinstance in world history of an officially designated urban residential color line. Inboth cities, the challenge of controlling the smallest, the most intimate, and arguablythe least governable urban spaces left important imprints on the nature of colorpolitics. To a great degree, then, the world’s color lines and the hurly-burly of urbanpolitics created each other.

These contingencies in the historical geography of urban color lines force us tocome to terms with lingering universalistic assumptions in historians’ analysis of con-cepts of human difference—most notably those associated with the search for theorigins of “race.” A vast consensus has emerged among scholars in many disciplinesthat color and race categories are continually reinvented within the context of socialand political contestation, and that they have no all-embracing meaning outsidethose contexts. But as is true of many “origin” narratives, the search for the originsof “race” or “racism” (as well as the debate about the role of race in creating slavery)usually begins with universal definitions. For some, any historical use of color cate-gories represents sufficient evidence of the presence of “race”—and many of us whodemur on this point still instinctively refer to “black” and “white” as “racial” con-cepts. More historians are satisfied by the idea that race arises once moral and cul-tural characteristics of groups are seen as inalterably linked to attributes of the phys-ical body, or are seen as heritable and thus linked to sex. Finally, some scholars usethe term “proto-racial” to describe early modern ideas or institutions that do notquite add up to their universal definition of race, but which surely laid the way for

50 Carl H. Nightingale


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“full-blown” racial versions later on, presumably in the modern era of “scientific”racism.5

The stories of Madras and New York force us to abandon such preset definitions.In the official discourse of both cities, intellectual projects involving black, white,body, heredity, sex, nation, people, color, complexion, casta, and race all had richlycontingent histories that were sometimes connected to each other and sometimesseparate. The history of “black,” which authorities in both cities used widely fromearly on, was separate from that of “white,” which replaced a preference for theself-designation “Christian” within the British Empire only much later. As “white”came into greater usage, other ideas about human difference, involving heredity andsexuality, were more firmly linked to color than they had been before—althoughmore so in New York than in Madras. Most striking of all, however, in both citiesthroughout this period of seminal developments in color politics, authorities neverfound the word “race” useful at all, even though it was surely available to them. Theyoverwhelmingly preferred “nation,” “people,” and later “color” and “complexion”as more general categories for “white” and “black”—as well as for other kinds ofsubcategories of people, including those defined by religious, cultural, and politicalterms.6

To analyze the urban politics of Madras and New York as “racial” or “proto-racial” in disguise would be to allow arbitrarily privileged notions of race to obscurethe sheer multiplicity of early modern concepts of human difference at play. It wouldalso be to muddy much more interesting questions: why historical actors prioritizedsome of these concepts over others, developed particular meanings and uses forthem, and used them in support of political and institutional projects. Indeed, themost important lesson of the tale of these two cities is about why color categories,not at all connected to a notion of race, were selected and deployed within urbanpolitics to help build key institutions of Western domination: segregation and sla-very.

“WITHOUT . . . DEFENSIBLE PLACES,” WROTE A BRITISH MERCHANT in 1642 from Indiato the Court of Directors of the British East India Company in London, “your goodsand Servants among such treacherous people are in Continuall hazard. The just feare

5 Joyce Chaplin, for example, invokes “The definitive and insidious feature of racism: its groundingin the human body and in lineage, which thus defines it as inescapable, a nonnegotiable attribute thatpredicts socio-political power or lack of power.” Chaplin, “Race,” 155. See also Chaplin, Subject Matter:Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 9–21, 157–200; George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 5–6, 11, 23, 39–40, 41, 75;Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century America (Oxford,2004), 125–140. For analyses that come closer to my argument here, see Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Na-tion’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-CenturyStudies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247–264; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Differencein Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, Pa., 2000).

6 Both David Theo Goldberg, in Racist Culture (Oxford, 1993), 62–63, and Audrey Smedley, in Racein North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 36–40, treat “race” as asynonym of “nation” and “people,” but neither mentions that “race” was used much less often and formore circumscribed purposes, a point made by Hudson in “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race,’ ” 247, 256, 259 nn.1–2. Nancy Shoemaker has noted that “white” emerged in a later period than “black” (and “red” evenlater); A Strange Likeness, 129–134.



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whereof hath induced the Portugalls [and] Dutch . . . to frame themselves in moresafe habitations.”7 Citing the precedent of their rival imperialists, the directorsagreed, and once they built their new fortress—named Fort St. George—outside thelittle fishing village of Madraspatnam, a new divided city grew up, much like theEuropean colonial towns that stretched along the coasts from Morocco to East Asia.

In these cities, tropical disease and long distances from the metropole kept Eu-ropean populations small—tiny in British settlements. Surrounding them were vastand generally increasing indigenous populations with long-standing urban traditionsof their own. Some of the world’s richest and most powerful governments heldsway—the Mughals in India, the Savafids in Persia, and the anti-foreign Qing inChina and Tokugawa in Japan. Powerful foreign merchant communities from acrossAsia and East Africa dominated many individual port cities. Slavery thrived in theIndian Ocean world, and European colonial authorities relied on slaves, even tobuild the walls around their cities.8 But overall, European expansion in the IndianOcean world was never fundamentally dependent on the slave trade or slave labor;the vast majority of wealth came from transshipping luxuries such as spices, por-celains, and cloth within the Eastern Hemisphere and back to Europe. Dutch, Brit-ish, and French mercantile companies were chartered to establish as much controlover this trade as they could wrest from the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and eachother. Under such conditions, Europeans did generally force non-European slavesand servants to live within their households. But the politics of defending and con-trolling Indian Ocean colonial cities was focused above all on separating the resi-dence of Europeans and largely non-enslaved local Asians or Africans.

As the British merchant suggested, the Portuguese had first shown the way, bybuilding a long chain of urban fortresses called feitorias, beginning with the castleof Elmina in West Africa in 1482. As these forts became the nuclei for towns, thePortuguese experimented with legislation setting aside separate quarters for Euro-peans and Natives, although not all of their colonial cities took a dual form. Whenthe Spanish founded Manila in 1570, they vigorously enforced a policy of dividingcities that they had originally tried less successfully in the Americas. Authorities setaside a heavily fortified section of the city called “Intramuros” for Spaniards, andthey passed stringent decrees banishing the local Filipino, Chinese, and Japanesepopulations to several separate neighborhoods outside the walls. In the early sev-enteenth century, navies of the Dutch East India Company took over many of thePortuguese forts by force and built some new ones of their own. As Remco Rabenhas shown, their walls were supplemented with the Indian Ocean’s most sophisti-cated systems of urban segregation, sometimes involving intricate population reg-istration systems and pass laws, most notably in their capital, Batavia.9

7 Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800: Traced from the East India Company’sRecords Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and from Other Sources, 3 vols. (1913; repr., NewYork, 1968), 1: 39–40, 217.

8 The trade in slaves to and from Madras was significant, but exports of slaves from the port wereoutlawed for a short time in the seventeenth century, and all slave trading was abolished in 1790. Ibid.,1: 127–136, 147–149, 545–546; 2: 81, 135, 451; 3: 382.

9 Some make connections between feitorias and foreign merchant enclaves known as fondaccos inthe Mediterranean, which were also related to early modern Jewish ghettos. Unlike these forebears,though, the feitorias were a vehicle of colonial control by foreigners over locals. Olivia Remie Constable,Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the



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At Madras, East India Company officials observed and debated the merits ofthese precedents and adapted them to meet the local constellation of politicalthreats. Far from being an almighty overlord, the ragtag band of company agents whoacquired Madraspatnam in 1639 did so under an arrangement that made the com-pany an only somewhat privileged vassal to a petty local official of the long-crumblingVijayanagar Empire, the Naik Damarla Venkatappa. Local sovereignty over the re-gion shifted continually and unpredictably over the next seventy-five years, and com-pany authorities had to fend off several besieging armies as well as spies who mingledamong the many Indians and other Asians who settled near the new commercialoutpost. The Portuguese occasionally harassed Madras from their nearby town ofSao Thome; the Dutch had a fort a few miles up the coast; and the French wouldsoon threaten from Pondichery just to the south.10

As the town grew around Fort St. George, Europeans appear to have built theirhouses closest to the fortress walls. By the mid-1650s, they built yet another wall,which formed a much larger trapezoidal perimeter around the whole European set-tlement, enclosing what was then called “Christian Town.”11 Meanwhile, it also be-came clear that the rapidly growing Indian city beyond those walls posed its ownsecurity threat because it provided easy cover for enemy armies. For five decades,authorities at Madras tried to cajole the city’s wealthiest Asians into financing a wallaround Black Town as well. In 1687, the East India Company’s powerful court di-rector, Josiah Child, even insisted that the Hindu and Muslim merchants of Madrasas well as the resident Armenians and Portuguese be encouraged to participate inthe local “Corporation” (municipal government) as aldermen, and in exchange paya wall tax. Some have traced this type of charter to the Americas, but as Child sawit, his goal was “to set up a Dutch Government amongst the English in India.” Finally,in 1706, after seven years of periodic sieges from a particularly mercurial local sov-ereign, the Nawab Daud Khan of the Carnatic and Gingee, Governor Thomas Pitt(grand-uncle of the “Great Commoner”) used British arms to confine the “heads ofthe castes” of Black Town in a local pagoda until they came up with the money. Astone wall finally went up around Black Town in the next few years.12 (See Map 1.)

Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003). Although no synthetic treatment exists of Portuguese cities in Africaand Asia, clues can be found in Joao Teixeira Albernaz, Plantas das cidades, portos, e fortalezas daconquista da India oriental, reproduced in Francois Pyrard, Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales(1601–1611), 2 vols. (Paris, 1998), 1: 417–441. At Goa, the clergy successfully pushed for religious sep-aration decrees, but secular authorities did not enforce them, and the capital city never took on thestructure of a divided town. C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825(Oxford, 1963), 5, 9–11. On Manila, see Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila: The Context of HispanicUrbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 38–63. On Batavia, see Remco Raben,“Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600–1800” (doctoral diss.,University of Leiden, 1996), 162–247; Leonhard Blusse, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, MestizoWomen and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht, 1986), 73–96.

10 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 9–24, 34–38, 43, 63–65; 2: 149.11 Ibid., 1: 204–207.12 Child’s instructions can be found in Government of Madras, Records of Fort St. George: Despatches

from England (Madras, 1911–1971), 61 vols. covering 1670–1758 [hereafter DfE], vol. 8, June 9, 1686,nos. 16, 27, 29. On the trans-hemispheric trade in colonial charters, see Stern, “British Asia and BritishAtlantic,” 701–705. For the wall tax debate, see Government of Madras, Records of Fort St. George: Diaryand Consultation Books (Madras, 1910–1953), 82 vols. [hereafter PC or “Public Consultations”], vol. 11,January 4, 1686; vol. 19, January 14, 1692; vol. 28, May 10, 1699; vol. 29, December 4, 1700; vol. 31,August 3, 1702; vol. 36, July 6, 1706. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 497–498. On Pitt’s resolution, see



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Indians played important roles in the politics and the divided development ofMadras, and not only by threatening the city with armies. In fact, the subcontinent’straditional openness to outsiders, which contrasted so markedly with policies inChina, Japan, and even Java, made the company’s initial deal with the Naik con-ceivable in the first place. Indian practices of caste and religious segregation mayhave also made the dividing of Madras easier. As in other South Indian cities, therival Right Hand and Left Hand Hindu caste alliances in Madras lived on separatestreets in Black Town, as did “untouchable” Pariars and Muslims. Many Hindu res-idents of Madras no doubt preferred to live far from what were seen as sacrilegiouspractices of the British, such as eating beef or hiring Pariars as household servants—although mercantile interests just as doubtlessly led many to suspend some suchpieties.13

British authorities’ relationships with Indian merchants at Madras, as elsewherein the Indian Ocean, were based on delicate push-me pull-you power dynamics. Se-curity needs to keep locals at a distance were contradicted by equal and oppositeeconomic incentives for close interaction. The would-be monopoly required exclu-

PC, vol. 34, October 25, 1705; vol. 35, July 6, July 25, and September 12, 1706; and Cornelius NealeDalton, The Life of Thomas Pitt (Cambridge, 1915), 214–230.

13 Patrick Roche, “Caste and the Merchant Government in Madras, 1639–1749,” Indian Economicand Social History Review 12 (1975): 392–393; Arjun Appadurai, “Right and Left Hand Castes in SouthIndia,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11 (1974): 245–257; Joseph J. Brenning, “Chief Mer-chants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel,” Modern Asian Studies 11(1977): 398–404. On the difficulties of attracting pious Hindu servants to work in European homes, seeLove, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 617.

MAP 1: Detail from Governor Thomas Pitt’s map of Madras, ca. 1711. From Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1:facing 593.



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sive access to middlemen, called dubashes at Madras, to make business contacts, helpwith negotiations, and provide financing for purchases. At Madras the company’sdependence on locals was especially acute, as cloth production required an elaboratecottage-industry infrastructure and thousands of artisans to make it work.14

Still, it would be a mistake to call the double city of Madras a case of “voluntary,”“mutual,” or “de facto” segregation. The walls themselves were, of course, the workof the East India Company itself, and they communicated commanding superiorityover Indian subjects. The architecture of the European section radiated might:parapets and cannons festooned the roofs of the walls, gates, and houses. By theeighteenth century, most buildings in White Town were plastered with chunam, asubstance made from the crushed shells of a local mollusk, which gave exteriors amarble-like appearance and from out at sea made White Town shine whiter—lit-erally—than Black Town. Proclamations from the company agent and later governorwere traditionally issued to the sound of cannon shots from White Town and largeprocessions that passed from the fort through the massive Choultry Gate into BlackTown. In support of the walled division of residences, governors felt it necessary toeither pass or propose laws in 1680, 1688, 1690, 1698, 1706, 1743, 1745, and 1751 thatregulated where various groups could live, sometimes ordering English residents torestrict the resale of their houses to other Englishmen. Because of all these measures,a dual housing market, and even a version of what South African historian PaulMaylam calls “fiscal segregation,” developed in Madras by the eighteenth century,if not before. Property values were deemed much higher on average in White Town—even taking into account Indian merchants’ palatial dwellings and temples in BlackTown—and tax rates for European property were set lower than those levied in BlackTown to avoid excessive burdens on Englishmen.15

On top of that, the British company was not above using Indian caste politics forits own ends. For many years, governors relied primarily on members of the higher-status Right Hand caste alliance as the company’s principal dubashes and suppliers.When the British sought better prices by allowing merchants from the Left Hand tobid on contracts, they provoked an enormous battle that centered on fights over theneighborhoods allotted to each caste. Governor Pitt finally forced caste leaders intoseclusion to negotiate a clear division of Black Town, complete with a system ofboundary stones, and the British got their cheaper cloth.16

14 Susan Nield, “The Dubashes of Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1984): 1–31; C. A. Bayly,Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988), 45–78; K. N. Chaudhuri, Tradeand Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge,1985), 80–118, 203–220. In the early years, separation was also aimed at controlling the movement ofthe company’s own servants, with an eye to minimizing private trade. Curfews and forced attendanceat the governor’s table for dinner were gradually abandoned by the late 1680s, however. Hiram Bingham,Elihu Yale: The American Nabob of Queen Square (1939; repr., [Hamden, Conn.], 1968), 20.

15 PC, vol. 2, September 1680, 115–116; vol. 14, February 27, 1688; vol. 16, July 21, 1690; vol. 26,February 25, 1698; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 25, 308, 395–396, 425–426, 573; Paul Maylam, SouthAfrica’s Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid (Aldershot,2001), 149. Property values in Madras were ascertained during a survey of 1727. J. Talboys Wheeler,Annals of the Madras Presidency, 3 vols. (1861–1862; repr., Delhi, 1990), 3: 1–10, 21.

16 PC, vol. 38, June 26, July 17, August 20, 22, 25, and 27, September 10, 13–16, and 23–25, October1, 6, 20–22, and 30, November 7 and 13, and December 2 and 6, 1707; vol. 39, January 1 and 20 andJune 10 and 23, 1708. Dalton, The Life of Thomas Pitt, 319–334; Appadurai, “Right and Left HandCastes,” 245–257; Brenning, “Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves,” 398–404; Love, Vestigesof Old Madras, 2: 25–30.



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As in divided cities throughout history, the color lines at Madras were semiper-meable, regularly transgressed by Indian servants, mercantile collaborators, and peo-ple in search of sex. Separation proclamations tended to arise in moments of crisisand to languish in a less-enforced state during more stable times. But the walls ofWhite Town and the color inequalities they created continuously served as a primaryinstrument in institutionalizing what became a color hierarchy—as well as a grandstage for the theatrics of an emerging colonial authority. In the 1740s, as Britain’swars with France and Spain took on trans-hemispheric dimensions, the process offortified and legalized separation by color intensified dramatically at Madras. In1746, the French seized the city, leveled the historic Black Town (wall and all), andresettled its inhabitants four hundred yards from the gates of White Town. Whenthe British regained Madras two years later, they forbade any building in the in-termediate zone, which became a military cordon sanitaire forcing besieging armiesinto the open. Then they filled in the languid Elambore (or Cooum) River to the westof White Town, allowing for a doubling of White Town’s area and making room fora bristling, state-of-the-art Vauban-style fortification system. (See Map 2.) Later inthe eighteenth century, the company subsidized the growth of White Town beyondthe walls. Its methods, which evoke those of twentieth-century South Africa and theUnited States, included grants of land for suburban “garden estates,” and the con-struction of wider roads to accommodate the greater number of horse carriages car-rying commuters into the city’s historic business center.17

17 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 347–348, 448–452, 520–538, and map facing 554; Susan Nield,“Madras: The Growth of a Colonial City in India, 1780–1840” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1977),309–336; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York,1985), 190–218; Susan Parnell, “Slums, Segregation, and Poor Whites in Johannesburg, 1920–1934,” in

MAP 2: Detail from “Plan of Fort St. George, Part of the Black Town and Country Adjacent . . . ” (1758),showing the destruction of the old Black Town and new fortifications around White Town. From Love, Vestigesof Old Madras, 2: facing 554.



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IN THE AMERICAS, VERY DIFFERENT epidemiological, demographic, political, and eco-nomic circumstances held sway, creating an intra-hemispheric, trans-colonial flow ofvery different mixtures of urban planning ideas. In contrast to the East, the Atlanticmicrobial exchange favored the increase of the New World’s European and Africanpopulations and wrought catastrophic decreases in the numbers of Native people,who were also in general far less urbanized than in Asia. Even after the fall of theMexican and Inka empires, Native American governments and economies could beformidable by world standards, as the governors of New York found in their manydealings with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and the Canadian Indiansbeyond. But, in part because of population decline, no Native government in theAmericas was able to prevent Europeans’ increasingly dense settlement of coastalhinterlands, the confiscation of the continents’ mineral resources, and, from Mary-land to Brazil, the appropriation of vast lands for cash-crop plantations. NativeAmericans were widely enslaved but were never available in large enough numbersto match the Atlantic plantation system’s sheer demand for labor. By well before1700, the economy of the Western Hemisphere, unlike that of the Indian Ocean,depended overwhelmingly on imports of captive Africans as slave laborers.

In some colonial cities of the Americas, residential separation became a featureof European policies toward Amerindians, most notably in New Spain, where in 1563King Philip himself issued an edict that established separate reducciones or barriosfor urban Indians, which were off limits to all Spaniards except friars in charge ofChristian conversion, and that forbade Natives from entering the “precincts of the[Spanish] town” in the interest of defense. In the French and British colonies, similarbut much smaller districts—called “praying towns” in New England—were estab-lished, and some frontier towns, including Albany, New York, passed laws restrictingseasonal Indian traders to camps outside the walls. In New Amsterdam, GovernorPeter Stuyvesant built the city’s famous, if flimsy, wall in 1658 (destined to give itsname to the Wall Street financial district) to protect the city’s landside approachagainst both Indians and expansion-minded colonists from New England. Laws for-bade Indians from “tarrying . . . during the night” south of the wall.18

Nowhere in the Americas, however, did such separation policies remain centralto urban politics for long. In New Spain, local authorities enforced their king’s decreelackadaisically, if they were able to at all, in the face of the rapid growth of a Christianmestizo and mulatto population and the declines in Native populations. In NorthAmerica, European settlement of the hinterlands of coastal towns meant that nearbyNative peoples—whose settlements often changed seasonally and were thus unlikely

Robert Morrell, ed., White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940(Pretoria, 1992), 115–129.

18 Quote from the Spanish ordinance from Zelia Nuttal, “Royal Ordinances Concerning the LayingOut of New Towns,” Hispanic American Historical Review 4 (November 1921): 753. Quote from the NewAmsterdam ordinance in Berthold Fernow, ed., Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 AnnoDomini, 7 vols. (Baltimore, Md., 1976), 2: 51–52. See also 1: 22 and 4: 32. Similar prohibitions on over-night stays were instituted by the British, but these applied to “strangers” of all backgrounds, not justIndians. Herbert L. Osgood, Frederic W. Jackson, Robert H. Kelby, and Hiram Smith, eds., Minutes ofthe Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776, 8 vols. (New York, 1905), 1: 135, 220, 246. Onpraying towns, see Yasu Kawashima, “Legal Origins of the Indian Reservation in Colonial Massachu-setts,” American Journal of Legal History 13 (1969): 42–56. On Albany, see City of New York, The Co-lonial Laws of New York, 5 vols. (Albany, 1894), 1: 89, 2: 150.



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in any case to develop into long-standing “Indian Towns”—moved farther inland,declined due to war and disease, or, as among “praying Indians,” assimilated intocolonial society. Although historians argue that schemes such as the praying townsprefigured segregated rural Indian reservations, the spatial politics of port cities suchas New York, unlike Madras, were decreasingly affected by the otherwise complexongoing diplomacy and warfare between Europeans and Native peoples.19

Instead, urban authorities in the Americas became increasingly preoccupied withsuppressing what they saw as the nearly constant insubordination of urban blackslaves. To such authorities, the idea of creating separate neighborhoods for slaveswas seen as nothing less than an open invitation to slave revolution, and possibly thedownfall of the whole Atlantic plantation system. Instead, they preferred a techniquethat went back to ancient times, forcing slaves to live in the households or on theproperties of their masters. In practice this amounted to a private, domestically runsystem of household separation, with slaves living in garrets and closets in the houseor in the “black houses” (cases a negres) sited in back courtyards next to the kitchensand stables where many urban slaves worked. To enforce that system, authoritiesfrom Mexico City to Charles Town and from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro passeddraconian black codes that limited slaves’ movements and actions and kept any in-dependent social or political life to an absolute minimum, especially between slavesand free blacks. In other words, beyond the master’s home, blacks had to be seg-regated from one another.20

Large-scale residential color separation of Africans was very limited in slave-importing colonial cities of the Atlantic. In New Amsterdam, the Dutch West IndiaCompany itself owned many slaves and for a short period maintained a guardedcompound for them. But for the most part, the segregation of Negroes occurred indefiance of the regime of slavery, not in defense of it. Slaves themselves, often withhelp from free blacks, built black enclaves—including Charleston’s Neck, Savannah’sBluffs, the yards of Kingston, and Rio’s first informal hillside settlements—as ameans to ensure a small measure of independent life within a brutal system.21

On Manhattan, the disappearance of residential separation for both blacks andNatives went hand in hand with the effort to formalize slavery. New Amsterdam had

19 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico,1519–1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 147, 370–381; R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination:Plebeian Society in Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison, Wis., 1994), 16–21; Kawashima, “Legal Originsof the Indian Reservation,” 42–56.

20 For a few examples among many on the residence of slaves in cities, see James C. Anderson, RomanArchitecture and Society (Baltimore, Md., 1997), 293–336; A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History ofBlack Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge, 1982), 96–99, 120–125; Cope, The Limitsof Racial Domination, 15–21; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J.,1987), 59–66; Anne Perotin-Dumond, La Ville aux Iles, la Ville dans L’Ile: Basse Terre et Pointe-a-Pitre,Guadeloupe, 1650–1820 (Paris, 2000), 462–470, 641–718; Pedro Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridge-town, Barbados, 1680–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2003), 39–40, 158–163; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in theCities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964), 55–79.

21 On the “Quartier de Swarten de Comp Slaves” on Manhattan, see Graham Russell Hodges, Rootand Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 12.Panama is an exception that proves the rule: it was rebuilt as a dual city after being sacked by HenryMorgan in 1671. The light-skinned elite there had less to fear from slaves than from a large free pop-ulation of color who were not tied to elite households and who became the inhabitants of the Arrabaloutside the city walls. Alfredo Castillero Calvo, La Ciudad imaginada: El Casco Viejo de Panama (Pan-ama, 1999). Thanks to Professor Aims McGuiness for help in summarizing Castillero Calvo’s argument.



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no formal slave code. A substantial group of “Atlantic creoles” who served as bonds-people to the Dutch West India Company were able to petition for a “half-free”status, and a number owned land in what were called the “new negro lots” or the“negro lands” well north of Peter Stuyvesant’s town wall, in the general area oftoday’s Washington Square. When the British took New York, they agreed to honorthis arrangement, but over time they also pushed for expansion north of Wall Street.In the process, unlike their counterparts at Madras, officials in New York assertedcontrol over “blacks” by destroying a wall. Land prices and taxes increased as thecity edged northward, ultimately forcing many of the city’s blacks to leave Manhattanaltogether, ending the faint pattern of residential separation.22

In New York, also in contrast to Madras, it was the local city and provincialauthorities—many of whom were slaveholders themselves and faced the threat ofrebellion most acutely—who took the initiative for ever more draconian strategiesof control, often over the objections of the governors sent from Britain. In 1681–1683, 1702, 1706, and 1712, the Common Council of New York City and the NewYork Assembly formalized slavery in the city and colony in much the same way theSpanish, French, and British West Indians had before. In addition to rules thatforced slaves to live in their owners’ houses and carry notes from their masters whenthey ventured outside, the 1712 code made manumissions even more difficult andforbade manumitted slaves from owning property. This made it impossible for anyfree black residential community, separate or otherwise, to grow in New York. Slaveswere dispersed in small numbers throughout the white residences of the city. Becausethe wealthiest New Yorkers owned the largest numbers of slaves, the greatest con-centrations of blacks lived in the wealthiest white neighborhoods. Authorities didagree to establish a separate African burial ground, but that only proves the ruleabout the structure of slave cities: black people were granted a “neighborhood” oftheir own only when they were dead.23

Laws such as New York’s created big obstacles to intimate relationships betweenblacks, including marriage. Local authorities also tried mightily but less successfullyto interpose their agents into other, smaller, troublesome spaces in the urban fabricwhere slaves could find transgressive autonomy and connection: workplaces, schools,informal markets, ceremonial grounds, taverns, and at night in the city’s labyrinthineback alleys. The economics of urban slaveholding often thwarted these efforts. Al-though many urban slaves, especially women, were domestic servants whose jobsbound them to their masters’ households, slaveholders could also make a good profitby hiring slaves out, a practice that gave blacks considerable autonomy to moveabout, gather, and even establish separate residences. Although the slaveholdingelite quarreled among themselves over the dangers of this system, and ordinary whiteworkers bitterly opposed the competition from slaves’ low-wage labor, pocketbookconcerns kept it alive, and new measures to control slaves’ movements proliferated.Local legislatures forbade more than four, then more than three, slaves from meetingtogether, strengthened pass laws, outlawed Sunday revelries and the sale of liquor

22 Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 1: 72, 78, 97–98, 177; 2: 51–52, 209; 5: 104; 6: 382, 385, 392.Hodges, Root and Branch, 34–36; Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New YorkCity, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2003), 23–24.

23 Hodges, Root and Branch, 63–68; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 31–36; Jill Lepore, “The Tight-ening Vise,” in Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York, 2005), 69–75.



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to slaves, and set ever more stringent curfews, which ultimately even made it illegalfor a slave to walk around after dark without a lantern. As Ira Berlin has argued,these laws, passed and re-passed throughout the Americas, only document the wideextent to which slaves flouted them. In New York, slaves continued to mount in-surgencies, often allied with radicalized poorer whites, most notably in 1721 and1732. The biggest conspiracy of all was that of 1741, in the midst of the same boutof brewing pan-imperial warfare that triggered a surge of segregation in Madras. InNew York, the result was a rash of gruesome public executions and another seriesof crackdowns on slaves’ movements outside their masters’ households.24

TO SELL THEIR POLICIES OF DEFENSE, CONTROL, AND URBAN RESIDENCE, colonial officialsdrew on rich languages of human difference. The crucial change in these languagesat both Madras and New York was the decreasing use of national and religiouscategories in favor of color categories, first “black” and then, considerably later,“white.” Important increases in British authorities’ power in both cities were ac-complished at the same time that the hybrid “Christian-black” opposition was re-placed by the more thoroughly color-struck politics of “white” and “black.” Despitethe divide between the institutions of British colonization in the Americas and theEast India Company in Asia, the rise of whiteness in both places around the turnof the seventeenth century suggests that the early modern British Empire served asa conduit for color concepts that linked West and East. Still, black and white politicstook different forms in the two cities, reflecting the contrasting hemispheric contextsand local contingencies that drove residential policies.

As Winthrop Jordan and others have shown, the history of blackness in the Westreaches back to classical times. The most complex premodern vocabulary of color,however, developed within the Muslim world, and when the Portuguese began ex-ploring, and slaving, on the West Coast of Africa, they adopted the Arab conventionof using “white” (branco) for Arabs and “black” (negro) for Africans. The Spaniardsalso used negro for the slaves they imported into New Spain, and that word wasabsorbed, along with mulatto and mestizo, in various Iberian-inspired forms intoDutch, French, and English throughout the Atlantic, including at New Amsterdamfrom its earliest years.25

European travel writers used a variety of colors as descriptive terms for Asians—“white,” “yellow,” “brown,” and “black”—but colonial authorities rarely used thesewords as official political categories for their subjects. The Dutch, English, andFrench, for example, never used a variant of the word “Negro” to describe Asians;

24 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge,Mass., 1998), 156–157; Hodges, Root and Branch, 48–50, 59–69; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 33,39–45; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan(New York, 2005).

25 On Arab color systems, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam (New York, 1971). For ex-amples of early Portuguese use of color terms, see Valentim Fernandes, Description de la cote d’Afriquede Ceuta au Senegal, trans. P. De Cenival and Th. Monod (1506–1507; repr., Paris, 1938), 58, 69; Boxer,Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire. On early modern British discussions of blackness, seeWinthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore, Md.,1968), 3–43. For examples of casta terms in New York slave laws, see The Colonial Laws of New York,1: 597–598, 766, 845, 922.



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in the Indian Ocean, even Africans were most often called “Caffres” or “Kaffirs,”after the Arabic word for “unbeliever.” Moreover, although colonial authorities hadoften divided their towns into zones for Europeans and Asians from the 1480s on,the records reveal no instance where authorities officially designated these sectionsby color before Madras’s “Black Town” in the mid- to late seventeenth century.26

Even at Madras, the choice of a color designation was not automatic. The in-habitants of the city included many people who were usually described as “black”by travelers—sometimes even “black as pitch.”27 British officials at Madras, however,most often used national or religious designations such as “Malabar Town” (the wordfor Madras’s majority Tamil population) or “Gentue Town” (a word that referredto either the city’s large minority Telugu population or Hindus in general) to des-ignate the Asian section of their outpost. Locals preferred to call Madras, or at leastits Asian section, Chennaipattanam (the root of today’s “Chennai”), in honor of theNaik Venkatappa’s father, and they avoided “Black Town” in their petitions to theBritish governors. Only after 1676 did the phrase “Black Town” enter the vocabularyof British officials, and it appears to have been a derogatory term. Some of thisdisdain may have come from associations between blackness and slaves in the At-lantic, but agendas within the local politics of defense and control were clearly moreimportant. From the city’s earliest years, the British saw local inhabitants as “treach-erous people,” and they most often used the word “black” as a way to express theirfrustration with Indians’ refusal to submit to company commands. The phrase “BlackTown” arose in the context of one of many energetic but fruitless efforts to get Indianmerchants to pay the wall tax. In letters written from London, the language of theEast India Company’s Court of Directors fluctuated. At one moment they were is-suing thundering directives to tax the “black merchants” by force, and at another theywere advising “gentleness and perswasion” to entice the “Gentues and Moores” totake seats as aldermen of the Madras Corporation and pay the tax voluntarily. Thecompany’s local agents, by contrast, had more at stake in being consistently respect-ful, since they engaged heavily in illegal trade to supplement their low salaries, andwere thus dependent on good personal relationships with the dubashes. Their ten-dency was to use “Gentue Town” and “Malabar Town,” and even “Chennaipatta-nam,” although “Black Town” grew in frequency. By the first decade of the eigh-teenth century, “Gentue” and “Malabar” disappeared from local usage, after Pittfinally forced the “black merchants” to pay for the Black Town wall.28

The history of “white” as a self-designation for Europeans has a completely dif-

26 For a selection of travel writers’ use of color terms along the routes to the East, see Jan Huygenvan Linschoten, The Voyage of John Huygen van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. Arthur Cooke Burnelland P. A. Tiele (1596; repr., New York, 1970), 28, 46, 64, 77, 94, 101, 126, 135, 183–184, 255, 261, 269;Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 3: Travels in England, India, China, Etc., 1634–1638(London, 1919), 233, 252, 260–266, 312; and Pyrard, Voyage, 1: 65–66. At Elmina, the African sectionwas sometimes called the “village of the blacks,” but not officially; most other names for sections of citiesreflected architectural styles, not color: “Intramuros” at Manila, “Casteel” at Batavia, and “Zona daCimiento” and “Zona da Macuti” (“Cement Zone ” and “Mangrove Zone”) at Mocambique; MalynNewitt, “Mozambique Island: The Rise and Decline of an East African Coastal City,” Portuguese Studies20, no. 1 (2004): 31.

27 Linschoten, Voyage, 269.28 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 84–85, 95, 118–119, 198, 206–207, 280, 368, 370–371, 421–422,

432–433, 443, 454, 497–498; 2: 52. On the end of the Black Town wall crisis, see PC, vol. 35, July 25,1706. Quote from directors in DfE, January 22, 1692. The authorities at Madras used the words “treach-



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ferent chronology and global geography from that of “black.” The Spanish and Por-tuguese occasionally used it for themselves, in obvious contrast to negro, but like theMuslims they used it more systematically as a descriptive term for Arabs and otherlight-skinned Asians. In the realm of official categories, Iberians in Asia much pre-ferred to call themselves “Christians” or by their respective national designations,and other Europeans copied this practice in both East and West. In the sistema decastas of New Spain, negro was the bottom category, but the top category was almostalways designated by the term Espanol. In Portuguese India, top place in a similarsystem was given to the reinois, those born in Portugal, not to “whites.” The Dutchappear to have almost entirely dispensed with “white” in the population registrationsystems of Java, preferring “European.” At Madras, during just about the entireseventeenth century, the European section of the city was universally called “Chris-tian Town.”29

It was not until the 1660s that authorities in any European colony began to usethe term “white” widely as an official category. The practice probably began in thesugar colonies of the British West Indies. The first censuses there, which date from1661, universally use the dichotomy of “white” and “black.”30 This contrasts dra-matically with similar documents from the same period from the British North Amer-ican mainland. Historians Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington cataloguedhundreds of citations to continental censuses and musters. Of the subset of thesedocuments that distinguished Europeans from Africans, only one, a document fromRhode Island, used the category “white” before 1700. Terms such as “English,”“Christians,” “freemen,” and “taxables” abound, and one Massachusetts musterused the elliptical category “souls besides the blacks.” The earliest sustained use of“white” on the mainland comes from the slave laws of Virginia. In 1691, the leg-islature updated an earlier law forbidding sex between what they now called “English

erous peoples” and “nations” for any suspected enemy, including the Portuguese and Dutch. See Love,Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 37, 39, 45, 246, 310.

29 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, Conn.,2004), 5–38, 42–53; she documents uses of the word blanco (211 n. 32 and 231 n. 91), but these are fromthe late eighteenth century; the word albino occurs in a painting on 54–55. Also, Magali Carrera, Imag-ining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings(Austin, Tex., 2003), 44–105. In the Philippines, Spaniards deemed the “white” or “light” skin color ofthe Chinese a sign of superiority: e.g., Maximilianus Transylvanus, De Moluccis Insulis, in Emma HelenBlair and James Alexander Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, 55 vols. (Cleveland,1903), 1: 309. At Goa, Afonso da Albuquerque famously ordered his lieutenants to marry “white andbeautiful [alvas e de bom parecer]” widows of Muslim traders he had slaughtered. Boxer, Race Relations,64–65. On the Portuguese casta system, see Linschoten, Voyage, 46, 64, 67, 77, 94, 114, 126, 135, 183–184,255, 261, 269; Linschoten uses “white man” (wit man) only once, on p. 216. See also Mundy, The Travelsof Peter Mundy, 233, 261; and Pyrard, Voyage, 1: 12, 17, 65–66. On Batavia, see Raben, “Batavia andColombo,” 77–116. The index to Love, Vestiges of Old Madras (vol. 4), contains an entry under “ChristianTown” on pp. 32–33 that gives numerous references to that naming convention.

30 Nancy Shoemaker speculates that Barbadian migrants to the Carolinas may have brought theirusage of “white” to the mainland; A Strange Likeness, 129–130. Seventeenth-century musters censusesfrom the West Indies and Bermuda, all containing “white and ”black,“ can be found in W. N. Sainsburyet al., eds., Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. for 1669–1674 (Vaduz,Liechtenstein, 1964), 495 (Barbados, 1673); and at the Public Record Office, London, in the ColonialOffice Record Group in the following locations: for Barbados, 29/2/4–5, 28 (1676); for Jamaica, 1/15/192(1661), 1/45/96–109 (1680); for the Leeward Islands, 1/42/195–240 (1678); and for Bermuda, 37/2/197–98(1698). For Jamaica, see also Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the EnglishWest Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 155, which gives a tabulation from censuses datingfrom 1662, 1670, and 1673 in addition to the 1661 document cited above.



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or other white women” and black slaves. After about 1700, and especially after 1710,“white” appears in colonial documents with what, considering the slow pace of cul-tural historical change, must be called sudden profusion.31 In New York, in 1712, theprincipal categories that authorities used in counting the population were still“Christians” and “Slaves.” In 1723, however, the census of the colony first used“white” and “black,” a practice repeated in 1737, 1746, and 1749. A similar trans-formation occurs in the language used in statutes, ordinances, reports, and officialcorrespondence.32

In Madras, the use of “white” increased at approximately the same time as onthe North American mainland. “Whyte Town” first occurred in an isolated incidentin 1693, and then not again until 1711, on a map published under the orders ofGovernor Pitt (reproduced here as Map 1). Authorities were nevertheless very com-fortable contrasting “Black Town” with “Christian Town” from the 1670s until about1720, after which “White Town” took over as the most widely used designation—again, the first place in Asia where this was the case.33

Why would colonial authorities abandon “Christian,” a term that for centurieshad marked them as instruments of God’s will, and instead identify themselves bythe color “white”? Overarching explanations about the favorable meanings of white-ness in Western culture or a secularization of Western society probably do not helphere, since neither could explain why “white” so swiftly and suddenly became a pow-erful term of group pride and solidarity in a succession of different British colonies.34

A more likely explanation involves political conflicts between Europeans overclass, religion, and nation that grew as the British formalized slavery in their Amer-ican colonies. Such struggles began in the late 1650s, in discussions that linked theWest Indies and Parliament in London. As the “sugar revolution” transformed is-

31 Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of1790 (New York, 1932). The Rhode Island document is on p. 62; the phrase “souls besides the blacks”is on p. 14.

32 For New York colonial censuses, see John Romeyn Brodhead, Documents Relative to the ColonialHistory of the State of New York Procured in Holland, England and France, ed. E. B. O’Callahan, 15 vols.(Albany, N.Y., 1855), 4: 420; 5: 340, 702, 929; 6: 133, 392, 550; and O’Callahan, The Documentary Historyof the State of New-York, 4 vols. (Albany, 1849), 1: 240–241, 467–474. I found no use of the word “white”before 1690 in the Brodhead or O’Callahan collections just cited or in any of the following: E. B.O’Callahan, Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New York, 1691–1743 (Albany, N.Y., 1861);City of New York, The Colonial Laws of New York, 5 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1894); and Osgood et al.,Minutes of the Common Council. “Christians” is used occasionally, and “ffreeman or woman professingChristianity” (Colonial Laws, 1: 570 [1703], 762 [1712], 830 [1716], 889 [1716]). The words used mostoften for Europeans are “freemen,” “masters” or “mistresses,” and simply “people” or “inhabitants.”

33 PC, vol. 20, February 6, 1693. Thomas Salmon’s Modern History; or, The Present State of All Nationsdescribes voyages to Madras in 1699–1701, and he uses “White Town”; however, his memoirs were notpublished until 1736, so this might reflect later usage. See excerpts in Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2:73. Alexander Hamilton also uses “White Town” in his A New Account of the East Indies, ed. WilliamFoster, 2 vols. (London, 1930), 1: 192–209; it was originally published in 1727 but refers to visits in 1707,1711, and 1719. On dating Thomas Pitt’s map, see Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 88–90. For otherreferences to “White Town,” see PC, vol. 48, October 21, 1717; vol. 58, September 23 and October 14,1728, and January 8, 1733; vol. 71, June 26 and 30, 1741; vol. 73, August 22 and October 17, 1743; vol.75, June 4, 1745; vol. 81, January 19, 1749; and Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 395–396, 425, 451, 520,525, 573, 604, 609, 622; 3: 52, 80–81, 167. In vol. 1, Love has reproduced a map of John Fryer’s from1672–1681 and affixed the label “White Town” under it, but it was not in the original. John Fryer, ANew Account of East India and Persia, Being Nine Years’ Travels, 1672–1681, ed. William Crooke, 3 vols.(London, 1909), 1: facing 103.

34 Jordan, White over Black, 7–8; Fredrickson, Racism, 52–54.



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lands such as Barbados into the wealthiest colonies of the British Empire, creatingBritain’s first true “slave societies,” the status of European indentured servants cameinto question. To many horrified observers in London and the islands, such servantshad been reduced to “Christian slaves”—a term that sometimes was increasinglyrendered as “white slaves”—threatening to make “our lives . . . as cheap as negroes.”Meanwhile, various clerics and later the Crown put increasing pressure on slave-holders to convert Africans to Christianity. Many slaveholders were reluctant to doso, fearing that conversion would result in emancipation. Morgan Godwyn, a prom-inent propagandist for slave conversion, inveighed against the tendency by which“Negro and Christian, Englishmen and Heathen, are by idle corrupt Custom and Par-tiality made Opposites; thereby as it were implying, that the one could not be Chris-tians, nor the other Infidels.” While no one ever made it an explicit policy, adopting“white” as the designation for free people instead of “Christian” could have clarifiedsuch matters, defusing dissension between the Crown, the missionaries, and theslaveholders, as well as helping to cement political support among European col-onists of different classes and persuasions in defense of slavery.35 This alliance be-tween whites in the British colonies also reflected different demographic conditionsand gender politics than existed in New Spain, where the larger Native and smallerEuropean female populations led to a “plebeian” class of mixed Indian, black, andEuropean heritage. Elite power there rested on segmenting plebeians into dozensof casta categories. In British colonies, larger white female populations created alarger unmixed population, so authorities resorted to a politics of whiteness, whichpurchased the allegiance of poorer European colonists by offering the compensatoryillusion of sharing elite status with slaveholders.36

In New York, the process of establishing and formalizing slavery occurred laterthan elsewhere in British America—and so did the arrival of black-white politics.Leslie Harris has argued that as European indentured servants became more likelyto outlive their terms of service in the 1690s, they could put greater pressure onslaveholders to reserve certain areas of labor to them, not hired-out black slaves, thusforcing slaveholders to negotiate across class boundaries for political support.Thelma Wills Foote adds that British authorities at New York needed to unite arestive population with origins in many nations of northern Europe. Economic andnational struggles had fueled Jacob Leisler’s “revolution” against British authoritiesin 1689–1692, for example. Since more slaves had also converted to Christianity by

35 Quotes on “white slaves” from Hillary McD. Beckles, “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean andBritain in the Seventeenth Century,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British OverseasEnterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 228–232. See also Dunn, Sugar andSlaves, 238–246. Historians of Virginia note similar processes at work in the aftermath of Bacon’s Re-bellion: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (NewYork, 1975), 327–329; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2: The Origins of RacialOppression in Anglo-America (London, 1997), 203–238. Quote from Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s andIndians Advocate (London, 1680), 36. Godwyn uses “white” frequently; see, e.g., 4, 24, 39, 84. On theCrown’s pressure to convert slaves in New York, see Brodhead, Documents Relative to the ColonialHistory of the State of New York, 3: 374, 547, 690, 823; 4: 138, 290, 510–511.

36 On the use of casta categories for social control, see Katzew, Casta Painting, 42–48. A white-blackdichotomy also seems to have arisen at about the same time in the French Caribbean. See Antoine Gisler,L’esclavage aux Antilles francaises (XVIIe–XIXe siecle): Contribution au probleme de l’esclavage (Fribourg,1965), 86–100. On the very different use of terms such as grands blancs and petits blancs in the latereighteenth century, however, see John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York, 2006), 51–82.



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the first decades of the 1700s, whiteness could well have offered more than Chris-tianity as the ideological basis for such an alliance between Europeans. New York’srole as a provisioner of the West Indian sugar plantations grew dramatically afterthe turn of the century, as did the number of slaves in the city and the numbers ofhard-bitten, “white”-identified, expatriate West Indian slaveholders. Such develop-ments echoed those that had occurred a decade or so earlier in the Chesapeake,where “white” came into widespread use sooner than in New York.37

If whiteness went hand in hand with the rise of British American slave societies,what, then, was the role of the Indian Ocean world in the rise of the black-whitedichotomy? The spatial movement of whiteness across time strongly suggests somekind of trade in color concepts from West to East. However, the records from Madrasand New York contain only inconclusive testimony on this question, and it will takea different line of research to determine how, and under whose auspices, the easternand western wings of the early modern British Empire met and shared ideas. Officialsin both cities made only passing references to people and places outside the scopeof operations of their respective colonial institutions. We know, however, that manyEast India Company directors invested in American ventures. Some also served inParliament, so they might have been familiar with the growing use of “white” and“black” in English discussions of slavery. Philip J. Stern points to the pivotal influ-ence of the company court director Josiah Child, who had much interest in imperialpolicy in general and American slavery in particular. Child’s letters to the governorsof Madras, however, do not make allusion to color politics in the Americas. Two ofthe most celebrated governors of Madras during the years immediately preceding theadoption of “white” for Europeans—Thomas Pitt’s predecessors Elihu Yale andNathaniel Higginson—were born in New England. Yale left as a very young boy,however, and got into the business of endowing a college in New Haven only at anadvanced age. Higginson grew up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, graduated fromHarvard College in 1670, and left for England in 1674. Thus, if he had direct knowl-edge of the changing color politics of slavery in the mainland colonies, it would havebeen earlier than the changes described here. Travel writers may have played a bridg-ing role, by familiarizing readers across the empire with the political mores of placeson opposite sides of the world. Their use of color terms as descriptions of peoplecould well have served as the model for the politicized use of “black” and “white.”Color politics, like slavery, was of course alive in early modern Britain itself, and thegrowing persecution of blacks there in the early eighteenth century may have alsoinfluenced the mindset of officials who spurred concepts of whiteness in the East.38

Whatever the answer to this question about the operation of global intellectualconnections, the contingencies of hemispheric and especially local politics in early

37 Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 16–17, 34; and Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan:The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford, 2005), 91–158.

38 Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion ofEngland, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic,” 698–702; Ber-nard Steiner, “Two New England Rulers of Madras,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1902): 209–223.On color politics in Britain, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race ; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race:Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003); Dror Wahrman, The Makingof the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 83–156;Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 1555–1833 (London, 1977), esp. 84–114; Rozina Visram, Asiansin Britain: 400 Years of History (London, 2002), 3–43.



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British India clearly did leave an enduring mark on the world’s color lines. At Ma-dras, the pairing of white and black fit different political needs than in the Atlantic,and gave new life to a different institution, the divided colonial city. Color politics,and the designation “White Town” in particular, was not intended to forge a newpolitical alliance between “whites,” but to tacitly renegotiate one between the EastIndia Company and the city’s important populations of Portuguese and Arme-nians—a situation that also distinguished Madras from most other cities in its hemi-sphere. Both of these groups had been allowed to live at Madras since the city’sorigins—the Portuguese to shore up the small British army, and the Armenians be-cause of their connections to Indian courts and their long-standing trade contactswith the Middle East. Among other things, the designation “Christian Town” func-tioned to welcome both of these groups and to encourage their loyalty—indeed, fora while, authorities even circulated a plan to double the size of Christian Town toallow more Armenians to settle there.39

By the early eighteenth century, however, the company was showing increasingimpatience with its Christian allies. The Portuguese had long been subject to sus-picion because their Inquisition-minded priests lurked in the nearby settlement ofSao Thome, and because they often deserted the defenses of Madras or spied forrivals. The Armenians increasingly fell behind on their taxes; traded with the French,Dutch, and Danes; ignored the authority of Madras courts in adjudicating their dis-putes; and were often suspected of treachery during wartime.40 Although bothgroups were manifestly Christian, the British held them to be of indeterminate col-or—sometimes they were pigeonholed as white, sometimes by the Portuguese castaterm “musteez” (mestico), and sometimes they took places in long lists of Indiancastes. In this linguistic context, the name “White Town” seems to have fit a generalstrategy among British authorities to cool their welcome of the Portuguese and Ar-menians, and to keep disloyal members of both ambiguously colored communitieson notice.41

Indeed, the new designation was increasingly invoked in the context of growingcalls to kick the company’s Christian allies out of the more privileged section of town.A long period of prosperity and relative political peace began in Madras during the1720s, attracting more resident English merchants and soldiers, and putting pressureon the finite space in White Town. Competition over real estate, especially with

39 “English Town,” which was used by some contemporaries, could have evoked nationalist or royalistpassion, but it would have undercut alliances with the Portuguese and Armenians. It does not appearin official documents. That “European Town” was not adopted, despite the widespread use of “Euro-pean” in Dutch population registration systems at Batavia, further suggests that Christian Town mayhave served to welcome Armenians. See, for example, Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1:184–185.

40 On complaints about the Armenians, see PC, vol. 22, November 28, 1695 (taxes); vol. 25, May 31,1697 (interlopers); vol. 32, May 7, 1703; DfE, April 16, 1697, nos. 5 and 8; DfE, February 12, 1713, 94;Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 231–232, 308, 425, 573; Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1:240, 2: 247–248.

41 On efforts to categorize the Portuguese, see Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 183, 376, 387–388,441, 481, 529; 2: 128; PC, vol. 17, February 7 and July 21, 1690; vol. 20, October 23, 1693; vol. 21, April19, 1694. On the Armenians, see DfE, April 11, 1688; PC, vol. 17, March 6 and April 26, 1690; Wheeler,Annals of the Madras Presidency, 1: 184–185, 204; 2: 273–276, 247–248; PC, vol. 22, November 28, 1695;DfE, April 16, 1697, nos. 5 and 8; PC, vol. 35, July 6, 1706; DfE, January 16, 1706; PC, vol. 41, June15, 1710, and vol. 45, July 29, 1714; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 231–232, 308, 395–396, 425–426,573.



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Armenians, exacerbated tensions.42 In 1749, when the East India Company regainedMadras after the devastating French occupation, local company officials fulfilled theveiled threat contained in the designation “White Town.” Some Armenians and Por-tuguese had sided with the French and enriched themselves off of the occupation.In response, the British passed new ordinances that for the first time explicitly for-bade Armenians and Portuguese from settling in White Town. Houses were con-fiscated, a pitiful sum was paid in compensation, and both groups were sent to livein the new Black Town four hundred yards distant from the fort. While this latestspasm of separation lasted, it rested upon the most exclusive possible interpretationof local color categories.43

HISTORIANS HAVE LONG WANTED TO ATTRIBUTE THESE DEVELOPMENTS to “race” or “ra-cial formation,” especially those who argue that slavery was a racial institution fromits origins. At least at Madras and Manhattan, however, early colonial authoritiesdid not engage in the “formation” or “construction” of “racial” categories of any sort,since they did not find “race” at all useful for their political or institutional goals.To them, the concepts of human difference that mattered were “nations” and “peo-ples.” The concepts “color” and “complexion” grew more important, too, as “white”and “black” came into greater usage, especially in New York. As late as 1744, whenthe New Yorker Daniel Horsmanden chronicled the repression of allegedly one ofthe largest slave conspiracies in the Americas, he used “color” and “complexion”instead of “nation”—but never “race”—as a general container for “white” and“black.” The first references to “race” in Madras do not appear until the 1770s.44

Winthrop Jordan has written of the North Atlantic world that “until well into theeighteenth century there was no debate as to whether the Negro’s non-physical char-acteristics were inborn and unalterable; such a question was never posed with any-thing like sufficient clarity for men to debate it.”45 However, the official languageof the color line in both New York and Madras, and the policies it helped to support,make clear that intellectual and political experiments of some kind were going on,

42 DfE, February 12, 1713, 94; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 308; Wheeler, Annals of the MadrasPresidency, 1: 240, 2: 247–248.

43 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2: 231–232, 308, 395–396, 425–426, 573.44 Proving the complete absence of anything in such a vast Babel as was any colonial city is of course

impossible. The publication of thousands of pages of documents from both cities in indexed volumeshas, however, helped me make a pretty good survey. The only use of the word “race” before 1740 thatI encountered occurs in some propositions made to New York authorities by what were called the“praying Indians of the three tribes or races of the Maquass [Mohawks]” in a 1691 document; Brodhead,Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 3: 770. In Asia, travel writers use“race” rarely to describe people in Asia, and as in this New York instance almost always to describegroups of common ancestry. See Linschoten, Voyage, 27; Mundy, Travels, 263. Pyrard de Laval uses“race” to describe Indian Brahmins and Banians, perhaps picking up on the hereditarian bases of thecaste system; Voyage, 1: 38, 751; 2: 343, 348, 374. These suggest that “race” might have been moreprevalent in spoken language than in written official documents; if so, it reinforces my contention thatcolonial authorities had access to the concept but did not find it useful to accomplish their goals. In anycase, words such as “nation” and “people” are infinitely more common in all of these types of sources.Travel writers use synonyms for ancestry groups—such as “posterity,” “seed,” and “issue”—at least ascommonly as “race.” On Horsmanden’s use of color and complexion, see Daniel Horsmanden, TheNew-York Conspiracy; or, A History of the Negro Plot (1810; repr., New York, 1969), 354, 363, 369, 371.

45 Jordan, White over Black, 26. Joyce Chaplin gives some examples of more explicit contemporarythinking on similar matters in Subject Matter, 79–201.



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unstated as they may have been, regarding links between skin color and moral char-acteristics, the possibility that the two might be inherited alongside each other, andthe role of sex in the process. For starters, “white” and “black” were not solely ab-stract terms in either city: they referred to perceived, heritable features of people’sbodies. Thus, even as authorities in both cities prioritized the black-white dichotomy,they retained terms such as “mulatto” and “mestizo,” borrowed from Iberian castasystems, as subordinate categories to designate people who inherited those physicalcharacteristics from parents of different colors.

But the differences between the two places were even more suggestive. Onceagain, the early modern histories of color politics and ideas about heritability andsex appear to have been loosely connected at best, even within the British Empire—subject to political contingencies operating on multiple geographic scales. The big-gest irony of our tale of two cities is that authorities in “segregated” Madras oftenencouraged cross-color sex, while in “integrated” New York, many saw cross-colorsex (and certainly black men’s sex with white women) as an abomination. In NewYork, unlike Madras, authorities also fanned such concerns to transform the colorline into the conceptual basis for a system of inherited legal status.

Because few European women could be persuaded to migrate halfway around theworld to Madras, many East India Company officials, including Court Director Jo-siah Child, thought that intermarriage with locals would be the only way to guaranteea loyal population in the city. Once again, this policy was a Dutch import, for as Childnoted, authorities at Batavia had long debated the merits of intermarriage, and cross-color unions were very common. Dissenters in this debate existed as well, includingthe company agent who in 1666 urged more imports of British women so that “yourTowne might be populous of our owne and not a mixt Nacao.” (In so doing, the agentdemonstrated that heritability could be linked to the concept of “nation,” and alsosignaled another intra-imperial connection, with Portuguese concepts.) However, tothe extent that we can even read such things into the sources, questions of heritabilityand sex seem to have been largely insignificant to the adoption of both “black” and“white” in Madras politics. Even though considerably more British women migratedto South Asia after 1720, the embrace of whiteness does not seem to be linked toa sudden jump in the desire to restrict sex to the boundaries of the color group.Indeed, the policy of encouraging cross-color marriages was not officially abandoneduntil the late eighteenth century, and then only when concerns explicitly voiced interms of “race” were brought up against it. Furthermore, the capacity of the WhiteTown–Black Town dichotomy to work as a cautionary tale about Armenian and Por-tuguese loyalty depended upon sustaining color ambiguity, not melding mixed peo-ple permanently into either category. If there was a characteristic inherent to am-biguously colored people, it was that a moral attribute, their degree of loyalty,determined whether they were white or black, not the other way around. In any case,the conclusion that “northern European” cultures were much more wary than Ibe-rians about cross-color sex is not supported by evidence from early Dutch or BritishAsia.46

46 Child’s efforts can be found in DfE, vol. 8, April 8, 1687, and vol. 9, January 28, 1688. Quote fromLove, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1: 247. On Batavia, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800(Harmondsworth, 1965), 219–230. On later prohibitions of cross-color sex, see Durban Ghosh, “Colonial



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In New York, as elsewhere in British America, questions of cross-color sex andheritability aroused much greater concern, ultimately finding institutional expressionin inherited legal statuses based on color. The Dutch once again set the tone whenthey outlawed non-conjugal sex between “Christians” and “Negroes” in New Am-sterdam as early as 1638. British authorities’ subsequent efforts to control slaves’movements were heavily directed at their interactions with poorer whites in taverns,where sex (and conspiracy) across the color line was presumed to be rife. Cross-colorsex was associated with a prurience and a sense of moral disgust that was mostlyabsent in contemporary Madras. As early as 1664, a British law had implied thatslavery was an inherited status associated with color. In 1706, in the wake of esca-lating slave insubordination in New York City, the colonial legislature more explicitlylinked slavery to the small galaxy of categories “Negro, Indian, Mullato, and MesteeBastard Child or Children” as a way of establishing that slave status would follow“ye state of the Mother.” The heritability of white skin might also have been a factorin replacing “Christian” with “white” as the official category for non-slaves duringthe same period. This was not, however, as Thelma Wills Foote describes it, “a pointat which the discursive construction of race began to take on its modern biologizedform under a racist state apparatus.” It was a highly contingent political decision tofuse otherwise independent currents of thought—the heritability of human moraland somatic characteristics with a pair of newly adopted color categories, themselvesseen as “nations” or “complexions”—in the interest of urban social control and theformalization of a slave society.47

WHAT CATEGORIES OF HUMAN DIFFERENCE DID HISTORICAL ACTORS PRIVILEGE at anygiven time and place? How did they use them? For what purposes? And why thoseparticular choices? By asking questions such as these, instead of assessing whetherlanguages of difference approached or deviated from an externally imposed defi-nition of “race,” we can identify some of the contingencies involved in the intel-lectual, political, and institutional development of color lines in the early modernworld. Read in trans-hemispheric contexts, the official discourses of color in twocities reveal the temporal and spatial dimensions of these contingencies. Decisionsto attach white to black, to link nations and peoples with colors, and to associate colorwith the heritability of fixed moral or legal characteristics and sexuality were neverinevitable. Nor was it foreordained that colonial authorities would apply these in-tellectual connections to urban politics and then deploy them to build support forinstitutions such as residential separation and slavery. In fact, the politics of urbanspace, with its focus on defense and control, was highly dependent upon the gulf inempire-building between East and West, as well as European empires’ sharing of

Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India, 1760–1830” (Ph.D. diss.,University of California at Berkeley, 2000), 34–80.

47 Hodges, Root and Branch, 12, 48, 93–94; Edwin Vernon Morgan, “Slavery in New York: The Statusof the Slave under the English Colonial Government,” Papers of the American Historical Association 5(1891): 3–16; “An Act to Incourage the Baptizing of Negro, Indian, and Mulatto Slaves,” passed October21, 1706, in Colonial Laws of New York, 1: 597–598; Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 127–128, 152–156.



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concepts and policies within each hemisphere. Black-white politics, by contrast,seems to have come to both New York and Madras when the otherwise dividedBritish Empire gained the capacity to transmit ideas within and then across the hemi-spheres—although further research will be necessary to determine exactly how. TheAtlantic world, and especially its sugar plantation colonies, does seem to deserve areputation for innovations in the politics and institutions of color lines. If theoristsof the “racial” origins of slavery have one thing right, it is that the politics of Atlanticslavery depended on a politics of color—that is, of blackness—from the moment ofits fifteenth-century inception, if not before. Whiteness came much later. But longbefore “white” or “black” became associated with a concept of race, color politicswas capable of boosting substantial increases in European imperial control in bothEast and West. Non-racial whiteness also helped generate political support for keyinstitutions of unequal wealth-holding—in commerce, slaves, and real estate—thatwere as formidable as any described by Cheryl I. Harris or David Roediger in laterperiods.48

Along the way, cities mattered very much, too, in both the Atlantic and the IndianOcean. As increasingly world-spanning phenomena, Western color lines took thespecific shape they did to serve some colonial authorities’ efforts to defend and con-trol their cities, by intervening in the politics of even smaller spaces—residentialneighborhoods, streets, taverns, households, and even bedrooms. The very complex-ity, variability, and perhaps ungovernability of those urban places taxed authoritiesin ways that forced them to innovate politically; thus, cities were creators as well ascreations of the global color line. The particular demographic or political economicdevelopment of individual places could determine much about the timing and theparticular meanings associated with color categories as well as the shape of the in-stitutions they inspired. The very residential structure of cities could also symbol-ically tell key parables about the unequal order of white and black. Madras’s gleam-ing White Town and its dowdier Black Town, for example, impressed travelers ontheir way to the newer city of Calcutta, which adopted similar designations in some-what different political circumstances. A more ambiguous version was also debatedat Bombay, and later British colonial cities further adapted the pattern.49

Later, from the late eighteenth century on, “race” did become much more widelyused; its definition was vastly expanded and increasingly contested (although it wasnever unambiguously more “full-blown”); and its political influence became pivotalto world history. It took planet-shaking modern events to make this so—Enlight-enment science, egalitarian political revolution, industrial labor struggle, the inven-tion of capitalist property markets, professionalized urban reform, bourgeois sex-uality, and the modern advance of world-spanning empires. But cities—and thecomplex politics of their increasingly multifarious spaces—continued to play key, if

48 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707–1791; DavidRoediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White—The Strange Journeyfrom Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, 2005).

49 The enormous influence of Madras on Calcutta can be followed in the original sources in C. R.Wilson, ed., Old Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing with Its History, 2 vols.(London, 1906), 1: 28–38, 74–78, 90–93, 158–167, 173–178, 214–222; 2: 4–20, 112–118, 129–132. OnMadras and Bombay, see Dulcinea Correa Rodrigues, Bombay Fort in the Eighteenth Century (Bombay,1994), 58–59, 72–115; and S. M. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect (Bombay, 1902), 104–109,138, 146, 152–153, 170–178, 206, 229–238.



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always still contingent and never preordained, roles in the ongoing reconfigurationof the global color line. As Atlantic slavery first expanded, then fell, during this newage of race, the White Towns and Black Towns of the East rose in importance asinstitutions of racial inequality, especially as new colonial cities cropped up acrossAsia and Africa, including South Africa. There, new, explicitly racialized concerns—tied to public health and other great urban reform crusades as well as to commodifiedreal estate markets—vied for importance in segregationist thinking alongside re-configured issues of urban defense and control. Early colonial urban separation isoften dismissed in modern accounts of racial segregation,50 but many of the tech-niques employed in the modern era—racial zoning laws (with their exceptions forlive-in servants), restrictions of property sales, property confiscation, urban cordonssanitaires, dual housing markets, dual fiscal systems, and official encouragement ofwhite suburbanization—bore a resemblance to those used in the early modern past,even if their adoption was doubtlessly dependent on new, unforeseen political turnsoperating on many geographic scales.

By the twentieth century, however, Madras’s long-forgotten role as an avatar ofcolor segregation was thoroughly eclipsed by the big shadow of an American formerslave city, New York. By late in the century, New York’s segregated “ghettos,” Har-lem and the South Bronx, became key symbols of the world’s race politics, as au-thorities in places such as London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Rio, and even Johan-nesburg contemplated the contingencies of yet a new generation of urban and globalcolor lines.51

50 For example, see John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregationin South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982), 2–3, 55.

51 I develop these arguments in Nightingale, “The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Cen-tury American Urban Segregation,” and Carl H. Nightingale, “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos: HowArnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History, ” Journal of Urban History 29 (March2003): 257–271.

Carl H. Nightingale is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Universityat Buffalo, State University of New York, where he has taught since 2005. Heis the author of On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their AmericanDreams (Basic Books, 1993) and a series of articles concerned with the inter-section of urban history, race, and world history. He is working on a book titled“Race and the City: How the Invention of Urban Residential Color LinesChanged World History,” which looks at the antecedents, dynamics, and con-sequences of the worldwide proliferation of race-segregated cities around theturn of the twentieth century.



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