Instead, the book serves as a compelling introduction to imperial history, especially for those unfamiliar with the shift from the so-called First Empire to the Second from the Atlantic world that shattered with the American War of Independence, to the East – India, East Asia and the Pacific. The result is British imperial history with a new angle, but no new thesis. The cities are at least as much a device as Hunt's real objects of inquiry. While he never quite confesses to having written a history of the British Empire, I suspect he wanted to write just that all along. But Ten Cities that Made an Empire is decisively not what Hunt calls antiquarian, not a "sepia version of the colonial past". Such a book could easily become sentimental about the British Empire, and something about the title and the jacket design plays to that. Hunt's is not a twenty-first-century alpha list, however – a fact that betrays what this book is really about: the rise and decline of the British Empire and at least as much the latter as the former, as the cameo appearances of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire indicate. All these towns have been hitched to the fortunes of a British-led commercial system over the past 300 years. Tristram Hunt has written a history of the assertively alpha cities of the British Empire: Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, Liverpool. Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Dubai, Sydney achieved a respectable Alpha+, while Leipzig, Portland, Algiers were awarded an unfortunate Gamma minus.
Two only – New York and London – came in at a steroidal "Alpha++". In the late 1990s, there was a curious attempt to identify cities that warranted global status, and then rank their economic and cultural significance on a scale from alpha to gamma.
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