Portable City

We would like to thank the many people who assisted in guiding this book through publication, in particular Series Editors Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin, who provided much-needed guidance while also giving us the freedom to attempt to produce the book we wanted to produce. Sincere thanks are also due to Laurel Plapp, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Peter Lang, who so patiently and clearly addressed our queries at various points in the process, and to Marta Podvolotskaya, Peter Lang’s Publishing Success Manager, for so efficiently overseeing the final production of the book. We also thank the anonymous reviewers who provided such fulsome feedback on our original proposal and on earlier drafts of the work. Finally, we offer our heartfelt thanks to our contributors, without whom this book would be much shorter.

Stephen Bowman and Kieran Taylor

Glasgow is Scotland’s metropolis. It has long been the country’s largest city and is the place where all the challenges and changes wrought by modernity emerged most clearly. Portable City is about the tangible and intangible significance of this metropolis as muse, as site of personal and collective memory, as imperial and industrial centre, as home for new immigrants, as bigoted slum, and as pioneering provider for the poor. More than that, it is about how Glasgow – a transatlantic city in ways that more celebrated destinations like London and Edinburgh have never been – has been defined by its historical entanglements with North America. In this knowledge, this book is a collective attempt to trace, analyse, and explain the vital and various transatlantic linkages that together constitute modern Glasgow.

Glasgow has been Scotland’s gateway to the world and the world’s gateway to Scotland. An Atlantic port city of sorts and ‘Workshop of the World’ by 1914, it sent its ships and machinery around the globe. Glasgow was also a place of Enlightenment-era learning, culture, art, music, and entertainment, and would play host to no fewer than four international exhibitions between 1880 and 1938. The city’s reputation for innovation and industry was enhanced by a local political culture historically rooted in a liberal unionist tradition. Crucially, this was heavily influenced by a progressive Presbyterianism and envied by civic activists in New York and Chicago in the 1890s and 1900s. Yet the flip side of this vision of urban utopia was the deprivation of the city’s slums, a criminal court system that dealt with more cases than anywhere in Britain outside of London, and the exploitation of the enslaved and colonised people whose labour had contributed to the city’s growth in the first place.1 The egalitarian ethos of Glasgow’s political culture says nothing about how the city’s wealth was created through empire and capitalism or their attendant miseries, obscuring the fact that ‘Glasgow’ has been a byword for poverty as much as it was a symbol of reformist progress. Writing in 1913 novelist and playwright Charles McEvoy depicted Glasgow as a ‘fine clean city’, but the citizenry he encountered as he stepped off the train were ‘physical wreckage’, ‘barefooted’, ‘emaciated’ and ‘half naked’.2 Glasgow’s underclass: ignorant, exploited and relegated to precarious employment and inadequate housing were regarded as the human detritus of the city. In this light, the ‘Glasgow Effect’ – public health terminology for the way in which the city’s population continues to die younger than its peers in other post-industrial British cities such as Liverpool or Manchester – takes on a new and more ambivalent meaning, raising questions about the lingering aftershocks of Scotland’s collision with urban modernity.3

Our book neither reproduces booster accounts of Glasgow nor does it diminish the significance of Glasgow as an international city. It begins from the assumption that histories of Glasgow, and to some extent Scotland itself, are best understood with reference to their transnationalism. This transnational approach to urban history is of course pertinent to many other cities across continents. Liverpool, Mumbai, Lagos, Johannesburg, Rio De Janeiro, and Shanghai, to name a few, all share similarly diverse narratives of global connectivity shaped by their historical international influence.4 The histories of place are thus interconnected through migration and language as well as those processes associated with colonialism and trade. These complex social and economic forces have shaped relationships between people and the connection and exchange of ideas. In acknowledgement of the fact that the national context is not always as important as the more geographically and culturally specific, transnational urban histories like the ones Portable City addresses are better termed ‘transurban’, as Richard Rodger suggests.5 This book focuses on Glasgow’s transurban relationships with parts of the USA, with Bernard Aspinwall’s unsurpassed but imperfect Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820–1920 providing the inspiration for its editors and authors. Published in 1984, Aspinwall’s book traces Glasgow’s determining influence on the transatlantic exchange of apparently shared Scotto-American ideas and values about democracy, Protestant moral theology, political reform, and civic governance.6 As fascinating and richly detailed as Portable Utopia is, it also has several important shortcomings. Upon its publication, J. M. Bumsted described Aspinwall’s book as ‘curiously comprehensive, if exasperating’.7 John Schultz called it ‘unmade history, without much in the way of structure or methodology’.8 In its critics’ views, the book’s argument ‘remains a suggestion only’, leaving ‘the nature, extent, and impact of the North Atlantic link … elusive’ and the wider ‘achievements’ of the ‘Scottish diaspora … abandoned’.9 Portable Utopia’s lack of a conventional index does not help the case for the defence and the reader has the impression that Aspinwall’s earlier journal article on ‘Glasgow trams and American politics’ benefited from the discipline imposed by its publication in the Scottish Historical Review. Although influenced by Aspinwall’s detailed survey of Glasgow’s entanglement with ‘transatlantic culture’, our book deviates from the roadmap set out in Portable Utopia and seeks to amount to more than ‘a suggestion’. By comparison, Portable City provides a succinct and evidential exploration of Glasgow’s transatlantic relationships, one shaped by recent European and North American influences on urban history writing and diaspora studies. This collection is concerned with examining historical relationships, exchange and interaction between Glasgow and North America as filtered through the cities of the United States’ East Coast. New York necessarily dominates these historical relationships, but Boston and Philadelphia are important too, as is Chicago in the Midwest.10

Glasgow’s history was shaped by cultural and economic exchange which followed the avenues carved out by shipping routes, migration, trade, and empire. An inspection of the destination lists for Glasgow’s passenger and merchant shipping fleets at the turn of the twentieth century reveals that they reached a diverse array of locations. Glasgow’s trade and merchant shipping crossed not only the Atlantic, but the Pacific and Indian Oceans arriving at strategically important ports and major population centres.11 The interconnected nature of Glasgow’s industry meant that seafaring was central to the city’s economy. By the early twentieth century there were 120 merchant and passenger shipping companies operating on the Clyde. The city’s shipping firms specialised in trade with the two key areas with which the west of Scotland had historical ties to: North America and South Asia.12 These ties originated in empire, most obviously with the infamous Glasgow ‘Tobacco Lords’ made wealthy by the work of the enslaved on the plantations in Virginia and the West Indies. The Tobacco Lords’ period of ascendancy was relatively brief, dating only from Scotland’s union with England in 1707 to the American War of Independence (1775–1783). But as Craig Lamont establishes in this volume, this was a formative time best regarded as one of the multiple ‘waves of empire’ that have washed over the city. With its fortunes so bound to the colonial economy, it is noteworthy that Glasgow raised its own loyalist regiment to fight against the Continental Army in the Americas and, in 1819, would dedicate the first statue in George Square to one of its leading soldiers, Sir John Moore. As Lamont shows, waves of imperialism left their mark on the built environment and have had a determining influence on the city’s identity. The statue of King William of Orange, erected in 1735 and commissioned by a member of the British East India Company is an early example of a trend in imperial mythmaking and memorial-building by Glasgow’s elite. Over the course of the following two centuries, this trend toward imperialism would lead to the erection in the city of statues of Napoleonic War leaders Lord Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, as well as Earl Roberts, Field Marshall of the British Army and veteran of the 1857 Indian Mutiny.13 Similarly, the Doulton Fountain, designed for the 1888 International Exhibition, celebrated the Canadian, South African and Australian dominions as well as the arts and industry of India, through physical representations of trappers, farmers and artisans. Yet, and though anti-imperialist activists launched an unsuccessful petition to remove the city’s statue of Earl Roberts in 2017, Glasgow did not witness a violent reappraisal of its imperialist monuments comparable to the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol in 2020. Yes, the nature and memory of Glasgow’s early connections to North America and other parts of the world have been increasingly scrutinised, but, as Lamont shows, the high-water marks created by ‘waves of empire’ are still in evidence across Glasgow’s cityscape.

The prevalence of statues to imperialist figures did not mean, however, that Glasgow was an undesirable location for visitors from Britain’s former American colonies in the nineteenth century. Kevin James’ chapter in this volume focuses especially on leisure travellers’ embodied experiences of the oceanic voyage between Glasgow and New York. Using published accounts and diaries of middle-class American and Canadian travellers making the journey to Europe, James finds evidence of cultural tropes and discourses that were specific to the New York-Glasgow crossing and rooted in a sense of place. Though Glasgow was not the primary point of arrival for American visitors to Britain, there was something distinctive and evocative about sailing into the Scottish metropolis. As one writer observed in 1882, there were ‘some curious facts connected with this entering of Europe by the Glasgow door … Glasgow is nearly a thousand miles to the north of New York City’.14 Another traveller described his ‘mingled feelings of pleasure and sadness’ as he ‘saw the land fade out leaving a vague indistinct line on the distant horizon’ on his outward journey from New York in 1889, but was similarly emotional upon first sighting the Irish and then the Scottish coast at the other end of the journey. As his ship made its way up the Clyde estuary and passed Dumbarton Castle, this traveller ‘thought of the old associations of Scottish history’ and ‘began to realize that we were indeed nearing sacred historic ground’. This attraction to Scotland’s ancient past, however, existed alongside a fascination with the modern City of Glasgow, whose ‘lights … presented a fine picture, which we sat and watched for a long time’.15 James’ assessment of these travellers’ accounts opens a revealing porthole onto the transatlantic voyage to Glasgow.

In addition to welcoming people travelling to Scotland for leisure, Glasgow was home to individuals born in the United States too. Using evidence from census records for the period c. 1850–c. 1900, Tahitia McCabe’s chapter provides invaluable and hitherto-unanalysed detail about Glasgow’s American-born population in the nineteenth century. In truth, Americans represented only a small proportion of the city’s alien residents, the majority of whom were Italians or Ashkenazi Jews many of whom were in transit to the New World. The relatively small number of Americans offers one explanation for the ease with which they assimilated into, and were welcomed by, the city’s native population, certainly compared to the more voluminous and religiously ‘other’ Catholic Irish. The fact that most Americans in the city could be accommodated within prevailing notions of Scottish-British or Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnicity eased their integration, though tensions did emerge in relation to the construction of Confederate ships by Glaswegian firms during the American Civil War, a reminder that geopolitics were not always conducive to good relations. Despite the relatively small numbers involved, McCabe’s analysis of Americans in Glasgow sheds new light on the transience of the people involved in the population movements of the first era of globalisation.16 Importantly, most of McCabe’s Americans were ‘Generation 0.5’, people born in the United States to Scottish parents who had since returned to Glasgow, or ‘twice migrants’, Americans born to Irish parents who had moved to Glasgow.17 These included Jane Walker, born in New York in 1844 to parents married in Glasgow in 1841, and her brother John Alexander, born in Connecticut in 1846. The Walker family returned to live in Glasgow in 1861, when Jane initially found work as a cotton weaver and her brother became a tinsmith. Other examples from McCabe’s research include the Kings, American sisters born to Irish parents, and New York-born letterpress printer Gavin Connell who returned with his parents to their Glaswegian origins in the 1850s. This should all be one sentence: Business and family underpinned Glasgow’s migratory transatlantic connections, for example, the Singer Sewing Machine Company agent Alonzo Kimball who moved to Glasgow in 1859 to act as his New York-based company’s representative in the west of Scotland, and New Yorker and manager of Glasgow’s famous Britannia Music Hall from the 1860s, Hubert Thomas Rossborough.

Business and trade between Scotland and the United States assume central importance in Kieran Taylor’s chapter on Glasgow’s 1938 Empire Exhibition. An attempt by the Scottish Development Council (SDC) to encourage inward investment into a city and national economy badly shaken by the Depression of the 1930s, the Exhibition in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park sought to showcase the best of Scottish industry and culture. Even though this was an event couched in the language of Scottish and British imperial connection, the Exhibition’s organisers had more than one eye on American markets. It was no coincidence that transatlantic shipping company the Anchor Line was one of the Exhibition’s sponsors, or that the event incorporated an ‘America Day’ on 4 July 1938. Taylor uncovers evidence of perhaps the most compelling demonstration of Glasgow and Scotland’s attempt to court the United States in 1938: the SDC’s appointment of Marie Kane as a good will ambassador, tasked with travelling to cities across the US and Canada to publicise the Exhibition and to counter American reticence to invest in Britain due to concerns about the likelihood of European war. Kane, a Dundonian born into an Eastern European Jewish family, was by her mid-20s familiar with the United States having been an art student in New York. Taylor’s chapter argues that Kane’s tour, along with Glasgow Lord Provost Patrick Dollan’s official visit to the New York World Fair in 1939 and relationship with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, placed Glasgow and Scotland at the heart of an evolving UK-US relationship in the immediate lead up to the Second World War.