Interconnected synchronicities: the production of Bombay and Glasgow as modern global ports

Cain and Hopkins’ influential theory of British imperialism opted for a metropolitan-based model of explanation, rooted in the interests of a City-of-London-based class of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, and discounting in the process events and experiences in the colonies and the significance of industrialization. By focusing on the simultaneous emergence of Bombay and Glasgow as modern, global ports in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues, in diametrical opposition, for a fresh perspective on the relationship between metropole and periphery, based on the concept of ‘interconnected synchronicity‘. This proposes that ‘imperial’ causation be viewed, at least from this period, as occurring in both arenas, based on a set of related and mutually transformative processes generated by the ‘globalizing’, commodity-driven imperatives of industrial capitalism. Introduction: towards a critique of the Cain–Hopkins paradigm This article seeks to identify and explain the complex set of processes that led to the virtually simultaneous creation of Bombay and Glasgow as modern though unequal global ports in the second half of the nineteenth century. It views port development as an integral, if somewhat neglected, aspect of British imperial expansion. It does so, moreover, in a manner that interrogates significant aspects of the theory of British imperialism put forward by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins in their now classic account of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, which argues for the predominance of the City-of-London-based financial and service sector, at the expense of northern manufacturing industry, as the mainstay of British economic power and imperial expansion for more than two centuries. Specifically, this article takes issue with their causation model between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, questions their perspective on nineteenth-century British industrialization, and brings to the fore the neglected Scottish dimension of British 1 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British imperialism: innovation and expansion 1688–1914, Harlow: Longman, 1993. 7 Journal of Global History (2009) 4, pp. 7–31 a London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 doi:10.1017/S1740022809002939