capitalism also raised a new issue of urban policy: workers’ housing.
Capitalist economic development moved the de facto urban boundaries and transformed the totality of the urban space, if much less so the historical centres. Real estate speculation became a major economic activity in the nineteenth century. The City of London came to display its character as the hub of world finance and its Docklands gained the buzz of the world’s greatest port. Berlin got its Bankenviertel, in Behrenstrasse near Unter den Linden. The Stock Exchange, or Bourse, became the central buildings of Paris and Brussels. Huge working-class areas were sprouting in the peripheries, often slum-like in character, lacking most amenities and consisting of mainly self-built shacks, much like those of the Third World in the twentieth century.
The architecture of the national capitals remained, by and large, within the inherited European-style repertoire, with varying accents and combinations. Neoclassicism and neo-Gothic dominated the most central public buildings, but there was historicism of the nineteenth century itself, as well as neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque. Under nationalist auspices, the old styles were given national interpretations, as we have already noticed.
However, European bourgeois nationalism did bring forth or promote some new styles. The most significant was, ironically, an antidote to the emerging standardized, industrial machine age, with curvaceous lines, floral decorations and bright colours. It was rather a family of kindred styles under several different names in different parts of Europe: Art Nouveau in Belgium and France (where it is also known as modern style) modernisme in Catalonia, Secession in the Habsburg area, Jugendstil (Youth Style) in Germany and Scandinavia and Arts and Crafts, Free Style or Art Nouveau in Britain.
Around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this style became distinctively popular among nouveau-riche national bourgeois on the European periphery, most boldly in Barcelona and well represented in Brussels, Prague and Riga, and more limitedly in Glasgow. Mostly it was used for private residences, but it could also be employed for fashionable stores and occasionally for public buildings, such as the Maison du Peuple in Brussels and the Municipal House in Prague. In Finland there developed a National Romanticism in heavy, crude grey granite, mainly for public cultural buildings such as churches and museums. The swelling Hungarian nationalism was sometimes expressed in a Magyar Orientalism.*
The European national capitals, spearheaded by Paris of the early Third Republic, succumbed to a ‘statue mania’. Between 1870 and 1914 Paris erected 150 statues, not counting other kinds of commemorative monuments.56 This was a tradition from ancient Rome, largely forgotten during the medieval era and revived during the Renaissance as a monarchical self-celebration. Now it was devoted to the leaders, heroes and stars of the nation: politicians, generals, scientists and artists working in all genres.
The imperialist nations of Europe flaunted their empires as national exploits. The national museums displayed colonial loot and conquests, most famously the British Museum’s marble statues from the Athenian Parthenon. Many capitals had official colonial museums, among them Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. The World Exhibitions had special colonial pavilions, and in 1931 Paris staged a large-scale ‘International Colonial Exhibition’.57 Trafalgar Square included two generals commanding British conquests in India (Charles Napier and Henry Havelock). Madrid installed a Plaza de Colón with a statue of Columbus in 1893 along the new south-north axis, Paseo de la Castellana. Murals in the Copenhagen City Hall boast of Danish colonies, from the West Indies to Greenland. In the twentieth century, between the two world wars, the authoritarian government of Portugal commemorated its maritime fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ‘discoveries’ and conquests in a major ensemble by the Tagus (Tejo) River; Mussolini’s Rome celebrated the fascist conquest of Ethiopia and laid out a grand Via dell’Impero. Street names remind us of colonial exploits: in Berlin’s Dahlem, of the German participation in crushing the Chinese Boxer Uprising, for instance. Colonial street naming, mainly geographical but also including some colonial governors and commanders, was particularly widespread, it seems, in the Netherlands. It started in the Hague, a favourite homeland retreat of Dutch colonialists in the 1870s, and later culminated in Amsterdam, which contains sixty-three colonial streets.58
National Foundations: Settler Secessions
Only settlers from Europe built nation-states and national capitals overseas, and their notions of statecraft and urbanism were naturally imported from their motherlands and/or other parts of Europe.* However, the socio-cultural and political parameters of their state and city building were fundamentally different, and so were the outcomes behind the surface similarities. The major conflict line in the Americas was not national versus princely sovereignty, but between local settler sovereignty against overseas imperial rule. In the thirteen colonies of British America, opposition against the latter focused on taxation; in Hispanic America, on trade monopolies and high-office discrimination. In British as well as Hispanic America, settler rebellions started as pro-monarchical,† and Brazil entered the world stage of nation-states as a monarchy.
Settler secession was not like the artistic rebellion against the Vienna Kunstverein, which started the artistic and architectural rebellion known in Austria-Hungary as Secession. It was not the launch of a new culture, although it did contain rejections of Old Europe’s aristocratic manners. It was more like the divorce of a middle-aged couple who had spent quite some time together but who had grown apart, with offspring cared for by the American part.
Metaphors aside, secession meant a different conception of the nation than the European one: no longer based on language, religion, culture, history, but on a territorial club of conquerors and settlers. The nation was a club of members, open to anyone entering the territory with the proper ethnic credentials. Like any club, the club-nation engaged in recruiting new members, advertising and subsidizing European immigrants, preferably from Northern Europe. This was a practice of underdeveloped, pre-national dynastic states, for example Frederick of Prussia inviting French Huguenots or Catherine of Russia inviting Germans, and was discontinued by the European nation-states.
In Europe, a central question of domestic politics was how many rights should be granted to the different classes, or orders, of the nation. In the settler nations, the rights of the people were less controversial. Instead, the key issue was: who are the people? Slaves were universally held as non-people, often ex-slaves and their descendants too. Natives and Mestizos were non-eligible for the club nations of the British secession, with the exception of New Zealand and its Maoris, too many and too powerful to be kept out. In Iberian settlement nations, Natives and Mestizos were usually accepted as members of the people and of the nation, even if they were de facto most frequently marginalized.* The settlers on one side against Natives, slaves and slaves’ descendants on the other is the constitutive fault line of all settler nations.
These nations faced two other specific issues, which also have borne the iconography of their capital cities. One has been their relationships to their extra-nation motherland, from which the settlers’ racial pride as well as their language and their culture came, but from which they also seceded. Another derives from the recruitment drives and their production of a multi-ethnic settler club-nation.
Among the nation-states of seceding settlers there is a noteworthy internal division very much pertaining to the construction of their capitals, deriving from settlement history, between secessions from the British Empire and from the Iberian ones of Spain and Portugal.
Centring Former British Settlements
Settler secession from the British Empire always resulted in new capitals being built: Washington, Ottawa, Wellington, Pretoria, Canberra. The reason is the kind of imperial
