The Imperialist Roots of the Manchester Model

21 May

One of my favourite recent memories of Manchester is from March of last year, a bright but chilly day on Oxford Road, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. I was attending a demonstration called by a coalition of Manchester Palestinian organisations including Palestine Action, Youth Front for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and others, to protest the dismissal of the director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Alistair Hudson, for writing a statement supporting justice for Palestinians as part of an exhibition at another institution. We gathered outside the main buildings of the University of Manchester, the owners of the Whitworth, before marching along Oxford Road to the gallery. Marching with hundreds of others, the low winter sun glaring in my eyes, I chanted a slogan I must have heard a hundred times before: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’

The memory has stuck in my mind, the stuck traffic, the energy of the small crowd, the winter sun, all bound together by that simple slogan. It wasn’t as if it significantly changed anything, particularly – though that action itself was successful, and Hudson was reinstated, the coalition of pro-Palestinian organisations in Manchester continue to advance to new goals. But for me, the words crystallised a relationship between us in the heart of global capital and the renewed waves of mass struggle against settler colonial dispossession in occupied Palestine, and brought new clarity to an urban landscape that can seem to continually shift under the feet of Manchester’s popular classes.

There is a common sense in Manchester, present for a long time but increasingly palpable, that something is wrong with this city. Talk to people in Trafford, Hulme or Salford, and they will readily tell you that they feel surrounded in their own city, loomed over by new multi-million developments sprouting up out of the centre. Further out in Moss Side or Rusholme or Levenshulme, Airbnbs, student lets, and trendy new bars and restaurants continue to erode existing working class, predominantly migrant communities that have been there for generations. Even the Northern Quarter, a constant guiding star of the city’s post-90s rebrand as a new modern cosmopolis for the north, has increasingly felt the pressure of capital development against its thriving nightlife.

The roots of the ‘Manchester model’

Caught between the cold steel of new developments and escalating rents, dilapidation, and the general social abandonment keenly felt in the urban peripheries, it is no wonder people are increasingly dissatisfied with what has been labelled ‘the Manchester Model’. And it is unsurprising that they are increasingly searching for vents to these frustrations, whether in issue-based campaigns like Block the Block, Manchester Cladiators, and Save Hough End Fields, or in the resurgence of housing unions like ACORN and Greater Manchester Tenants’ Union.

In a piece written for Tribune in November 2022, Isaac Rose seeks to lay out the historical roots of Manchester’s political economy, and in particular, its emergence as an exemplar of neoliberal urban developmentalism in the 21st century:

with every new yuppie bar opening, some with zany quirks like the phallic waffle shop; and every new outrage—like the razor-thin 26 storey tower proposed on a carpark next to the Britons Protection, a Peterloo-era pub—a feeling stirs among the city’s people; one articulated by Mark E. Smith back in 2008: ‘somebody’s murdered Manchester and not told me. Somebody’s taken it to the dogs, ripped from it a history.’

But who is this somebody? And a further question: how did we get to this point?¹

Drawing largely from the urban geography book City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, edited by Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, Rose concisely and persuasively outlines the emergence of Manchester as a key centre of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, including its colonial origins, through deindustrialisation and Thatcherism, to the deeply entrenched inequality that characterises the city in the present. More importantly, he also posits that this trajectory formed and was formed by two competing political traditions, with two competing social bases. On the one hand, there were the working classes’ traditions of social reform and sedition, from the first militant trade unionists documented by Engels, to the key place the city held for radical suffragettes and Pan-Africanists in the interwar period, to the municipal New Left of the 1980s and scattered waves of mass protest in the present. On the other hand, there were the traditions of the city’s bourgeoisie, from its roots in the colonialism and laissez-faire of the Industrial Revolution to today’s neoliberal developers. Part of Rose’s achievement is to accessibly lay out Manchester’s history as one of class struggle.

Beyond this, however, Rose demonstrates that the roots of the present crisis in the city stem from the repeated resolution of its urban class struggles in opportunistic ‘reforms’ that allow capital to perpetuate its hegemony over Manchester’s majority working class residents. This pattern repeats itself at every stage of the city’s development, from the liberal dominance of Chartist and anti-Corn Law struggles at the end of the Industrial Revolution, to the New Left’s acquiescence to Thatcherite policy following her re-election in 1987. This capitulation by the Labour council marked the collapse, not of the region’s industrial identity, which had already been steadily eroded by a variety of economic conditions over the preceding decades, but of an attempt by Manchester’s independent councillors to chart a path through industrial decline that didn’t wholeheartedly embrace ‘entrepreneurial’ partnerships with the private sector. As Rose documents, it is these public-private partnerships that have made the city what it is today; at once, an exemplar of capitalist creativity and growth, held up by neoliberal urban planners, the New Labour government, and discontented ‘creative classes’ in other cities, and at the same time one of the most unequal cities in the country.

Turning to the two decades that have passed since the publication of City of Revolution, Rose observes that the basic model has been preserved with very little change since the early 90s, with Labour councillors continually insisting that further economic growth through private sector development is the only way to combat poverty in the city. Even the dramatic negative effects of the financial crash on the housing market can seem like a blip on the record next to Manchester’s extraordinary property boom through the 2010s. In attempting to explain this, Rose follows a number of recent reports by Greater Manchester Housing Action (a network of scholars and campaigners largely focusing on analysing and agitating around housing issues in the region), as well as other left analysts and think tanks, that emphasise the financialisation of the housing sector, especially by international actors such as Abu Dhabi United Group, and the Hong Kong-based Far East Consortium. If, as one of these reports suggests, the question is, ‘Who owns the city?’, according to Rose and co., the answer is increasingly not local residents, but foreign capital.

The pitfalls of ‘financialisation’

If Rose is arguing that financialisation is the primary cause for the problems Manchester is facing today, he would certainly be on trend. Financialisation has, since the financial crash of 2008, been an increasingly popular framework for heterodox economists, in which the roots of capitalist instability and inequality lie in the increasing dependence of the economy on the abstractions of high finance. This has also been supplemented by the theory of ‘rentierism’, accepted even by mainstream economic commentators such as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times;

‘rent’ means rewards over and above those required to induce the desired supply of goods, services, land or labour. “Rentier capitalism” means an economy in which market and political power allows privileged individuals and businesses to extract a great deal of such rent from everybody else… While the finance sector is an important part of this monopolistic development, so that ‘financialisation’ has enabled monopoly sectors to create their own profits (if often illusory) and generate financial crashes, the real enemy of successful capitalism is ‘the decline of competition’.

In arguments like Wolf’s, finance appears as a kind of external parasite on the ‘real’ economy, through which powerful actors can skim off the surface of productive sectors. Such a paradigm implies that crisis emerges when finance causes the productive labour of local communities to be superseded by the profit motive. It is easy to see how this picture might resonate with common critiques of landlords among tenants organisers, and even how it might provide a way for them to link their immediate struggles to the broader crisis of capitalism. However, we ought to hesitate before accepting the idea that the danger of ‘the Manchester model’ lies in financialisation alone, or the corollary, in its increasing dependence on foreign capital – and should instead centre a historically grounded understanding of Manchester as a node in the internationalisation of British capital, for which financialisation is but a recent addition to its arsenal.

It is certainly true that given the extensive international networks of contemporary finance, the presence of international actors in the housing market is one piece of evidence among others for the increasing integration of that market into the financial system. But, as Rose notes, Manchester has always been an integral city in the world capitalist system. It was cotton from slave plantations in the Americas that first transformed it from a small rural market town to the centre of British industry that would become a model for capitalist development the world over (the city council can still occasionally be found boasting about it being ‘built on King Cotton’). When these industries collapsed in the late 20th century, a combination of state and private measures combined to trap significant Afro-Caribbean and South Asian migrant communities in low wages and poor conditions to keep the urban economy running, and eventually to fuel its transition to a cosmopolitan service hub.

Importantly, the financial sector has always been central to the power of British imperialism. Like many European powers, the initial process of British colonisation in many regions began with trade, rather than outright conquest. Colonial hegemony meant that Britain was able to enforce unequal terms of this trade on its ‘partners’, through which it accumulated its vast imperial wealth. As Britain began to fall from its place as the key world imperial power in the early 20th century, finance became even more central. As Marxist economist Michael Roberts has argued, from this period onwards, Britain became a rentier economy, that is, ‘a national [economy] where the capitalist sector appropriates much surplus value in the form of interest, dividends and profits through non-productive services like finance, insurance, and so-called business services’ rather than direct exploitation of labour power. In some ways, Thatcherism might be summarised as the structural completion of this transition, uncoupling historic industrial communities, such as those in Manchester, from the financial forces that continue to dominate the city.²

As such, financialisation is one important tool that imperial capital has used to perpetuate its hegemony in Manchester, and its various global connections, through a series of economic transitions. But it is also, just that; one tool, operating as part of a variety of processes that have shaped Manchester’s urban landscape from the Industrial Revolution onwards.

Development’s imperial roots

The risks of overstating the nature of financialisation may seem relatively abstract and distant from the realities of ordinary Mancunians facing the very concrete threats of gentrification, dispossession, and the privatisation of public space in their city. But under Manchester’s current developmental regime, it is crucial that organisers understand that such threats emerge not from any abstract imposition of the finance sector onto housing, but from the cooperation between the concrete institutions of developer corporations and the local council.

This has implications for organising interventions. Such a shift towards financialisation is even more dangerous, according to Rose, because financial capital is harder to control than the local forms of capital that characterised Manchester’s industrial past:

Politicians and policymakers may think they can, like Faust, cut a deal with the monster, cash in on the investment and get what they want out of it. They fail to foresee that they may one day lose control. It feels like this moment is fast approaching in Manchester – if it has not already arrived.

Yet while Rose rightfully acknowledges that in Manchester, responsibility for the present housing crisis lies with the local leadership as much as with Westminster, his emphasis on the uncontrollable nature of financialisation undercuts this argument. If the housing market is out of control, who is going to control it if not the strong arm of the state? Furthermore, it is even more concerning that this problem is characterised by ‘the increasingly important role’ of international capital, in what Rose calls “the (re)globalisation of the city’s economy”. As already noted, Manchester’s economy has always been ‘global’ via the city’s position in the imperial economy, a position which has been formative in its internal economic organisation of its diverse population. In this context, the question, ‘Who owns the city?’, though perhaps rhetorically effective, is highly reductive, and contains the troubling implication that, in a reversal of its historic role, Manchester itself is now a city that is exploited by foreign capital, rather than a city that continues to exploit the entire world.

In practice, however, the majority of the ‘Big 13’ developers that drive the Manchester Model are British, and many even originated in the city themselves.³ One of these British companies, Select Property Group, even brags about how they built their brand on the Dubai boom of the early 2000s, capitalising on the new opportunities created by neocolonial oil extraction in the region. Neocolonialism is the familiar story behind many of these companies, even those that are not of direct British origin. For example, the Gulf monarchies, such as the House of Nahyan which controls the Abu Dhabi United Group, were set up by the British Empire in the mid-20th century to ensure continued imperial dominance as Britain became unable to afford a continued presence in the region. Even before the discovery of oil, Britain’s trade connections in the Indian Ocean were significant enough to merit propping up local elites against escalating radical insurgencies such as the Dhofar Liberation Front.⁴ At the same time, the dependence of these states on Western support and on the oil economy makes them highly vulnerable to both the vacillations of the world economy, and continued resistance on the ground. Housing investments in Manchester offer this comprador class a way to broaden their economic assets without breaking with the oil economy, or by extension, with imperialism.

Similarly, Hong Kong’s existence as a key financial hub in East Asia – central for developers like the Far East Consortium – is inextricable from its historic role as a British commercial centre, which has continued well up until recent times even in spite of Communist and Nationalist alternatives in the 20th century and British imperial decline. But mainstream financial commentators are increasingly uncertain of Hong Kong’s future status in world finance, given the city’s changing relationship to the People’s Republic of China and its very different approach to financial management. As in the case of the Gulf states, house investments might offer Hong Kong financiers a way to easily secure their assets away from this potential financial instability.

These investments are not primarily a form of foreign domination over Manchester, but an extension of colonial wealth transfer, by which labour exploitation and resource extraction in the global south create property in the imperial core. A narrow focus on housing financialisation misses these wider imperial connections and with them, valuable opportunities for solidarity.

The dangers of chauvinism come to the fore

Indeed, these practices of neocolonial control and domination that have been used to shore up Britain’s collapsing imperial economy on the global scale are very similar to the methods by which Manchester has solidified its status as a successful model of capitalist development. Abolitionist scholar Jackie Wang has described, in a US context, how neoliberalism has reshaped urban environments, with some areas becoming consumer playgrounds, and others impoverished zones open to ‘municipal looting’ through wage exploitation, dispossession, and policing. It is the police, and the vast networks of surveillance they depend upon, that patrol these urban divides and, when necessary, maintain them with brutal violence.⁵ The police force first developed in Britain in the 19th century as capital’s private guards for colonial wealth that sat in British harbours.⁶ Today, colonial wealth can be seen as congealed in forms such as, among other things, the property boom in cities like Manchester. It is no coincidence, for example, that some of the worst gentrification in the city is taking place in areas such as Moss Side, Hulme, and Rusholme, which are home to long-standing migrant communities, with distinct local cultures and economies now increasingly under threat. Even in publications as mainstream as the Manchester Evening News, this gentrification, which long predates the current neoliberal model of urban governance, is being discussed as comparable to ‘ethnic cleansing’ and linked (if unconsciously) to Britain’s imperial legacies.⁷

Yet these specifically internal forms of racialised dispossession, however long-standing in the city, are still largely absent not only from the dominant left critiques of the Manchester model, but also from the practice of many housing campaigns. For example, there have been consistent reports of anti-Traveller hostility from the resident-led Save Hough End Fields campaign in south Manchester, despite, as local campaigner Sean Benstead has argued, the fact that ‘[both] communities [that is, local residents and GRT communities] have been under attack through [Manchester City Council]-led enclosures that aim to facilitate rent extraction.’⁸ This hostility has extended as far as tacitly supporting police and council efforts to evict Travellers from Hough End Fields, even as these violent measures legitimate the possibility of state violence to remove other resident-led disruptions from the fields.

In a city built on imperialist extraction and exploitation, many residents support the methods by which development is proceeding because these are the same methods by which the city – and ‘our’ place in it – was made. Endorsing these forms of dispossession leaves many local residents objecting to the symptoms of development but supportive of its root causes. The variety of legal, judicial, economic, and policing practices by which some are naturalised as ‘local’ or belonging to the city, and others are seen as foreign, alien, invading public space, are central to Manchester’s development regime.

Yet these processes and the wider national-imperial economy in which they are situated are largely passed over in silence by dominant left critiques of the Manchester Model, as represented by Rose. Many local residents share with the financialisation model proposed by such critics an assumption that nefarious foreign influences are to blame for Manchester’s current urban problems, an assumption that channels simple not-in-my-back-yardism into open racism.

This social-chauvinism represents a consensus between the frustrations vented by many residents and housing organisers, and the council, the police, and other regional institutions that Rose rightly blames for the current crisis. Last summer, I attended an event by the Labour Housing Group at which an Oldham councillor, Hannah Roberts, jokingly made a jab at Paul Dennett, Mayor of Salford and Andy Burnham’s Housing Chief, about ‘making deals with the Chinese’. But whilst international actors are of course actively pursuing various investments and projects in Greater Manchester, the neoliberal restructuring of the city is driven primarily by internal factors: the open door between local government and property developers, the opportunism of the Labour Party in government here, and the crisis of political-economic legitimacy in the face of over forty years of industrial decay. Labour Party figures like Roberts and Dennett need neoliberal mass-rentierism to maintain the city’s economic power and, thereby, their own political influence, in the face of the collapse of the region’s traditional industrial base.

Foreign developers are a convenient foil, allowing regional government to imply ‘globalisation’ is the root of dissatisfaction with ‘the Manchester model’, as if this globalisation is neatly separable from their own policies, or even British capital as such. Manchester’s capitalism has always been global, and always sought to exploit and extract from a global empire, for its own regional-national development.

Tensions at the heart of Manchester’s ‘radical history’ – and a way forward

This displacement of blame, and the hardening of residents’ chauvinism into open racism, underscores a longer historical pattern that imperils the advance of any emancipatory political project in Manchester.

This global context highlights that, whilst Rose is right to say that the city’s Labour administration’s claims to Manchester’s radical histories is largely opportunistic, opportunism is central to those radical histories themselves. For example, though the left and local government are both rightly proud of the city’s historic legacy of trade unionism, as represented by the founding of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) at the Mechanics’ Institute in 1868, one can also trace the origins of Britain’s border regime back to this same legacy. The first modern anti-migrant legislation was the 1905 Aliens Act, primarily targeting Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, followed closely on from a decade-long campaign by the TUC on the pretext that these migrants were undercutting British wages and stealing British jobs. At the same time, Jewish trade unionists in industrial centres like Manchester struggled against both exploitation in the workplace and nationalism in trade unions, drawing on their experience of both workplace and nationalist struggles under Tsarism.⁹

That for Jewish trade unionists at the turn of the century, an experience of state violence crystallised simultaneous struggles across multiple terrains is a recurring feature of migrant organising in Manchester. For example, in the 60s, West Indian associations in the city would be increasingly split between those leaders based in the suburbs, who were frequently prepared to accommodate with the city council over possible reforms, and those based in Moss Side, facing the brunt of police brutality, for whom USian Black Power movements suggested a more militant alternative.¹⁰ This regionalisation of urban space, as a response to differentiated policing of urban space that precursors later developmental divisions within the city, would recur in the struggles of anti-fascists, Black Power militants, and the Asian Youth Movements a decade later, who aimed to defend specific areas from far right or police aggression. As already noted, many of these urban spaces that have been the history hotbeds of police brutality and resistance to it are today the frontlines of gentrification in Manchester.

Yet the significance of this urban differentiation, and the concomitant structural coincidence of state violence and struggles over housing, for contemporary struggles is not often recognised. In Glasgow, for example, a city with similar post-industrial legacies as Manchester, the movement against immigration raids has proceeded within local tenants organising in the No Evictions Network as well as community hubs such as the Unity Centre. It is no coincidence that the resistance at Kenmure Street, which shot anti-raids work to new heights of visibility for both many on the left and for the state, occurred in one of these frontlines of gentrification, where newer residents, often associated with the university, encountered long standing migrant communities in Pollokshields.

The ramifications of that newfound visibility are yet to be seen. But it is certainly part of a wider turn on the post-Corbyn left towards ‘community organising’, focusing on local neighbourhood links and support instead of state-oriented projects. The victory of Palestine Action in shutting down the Elbit plant in Oldham demonstrates not just the crucial role of direct action, but of community mobilisation, through the hundreds of Oldham residents who saw links between the struggles of Palestinians and the kind of city they want to live in closer to home, and came out to maintain the continuous resistance outside the plant.

Such forms of organising demonstrate that neoliberal urban restructuring, as exemplified by the Manchester model, is not just about housing, and cannot be answered by a simple critique of financialisation. Rather, the city has long been built on imperialist foundations, and though there have been key renovations over the past two hundred years, the essential structure of the urban landscape remains one of racialised differentiation at home and abroad. And the challenges of urban struggle in Manchester are not unique to this city. As Rose writes,

The benefit of exploring Manchester is not that it provides a singular case study of neoliberal urbanisation, but rather that for picture which emerges of a city government that has been unusually effective at applying the tenets of neoliberal urbanism. By understanding this city we have a sound basis to grasp wider patterns in the economy [sic].

Rose has made a serious attempt to provide a historical and analytical account for much of the common sense dissatisfaction with Manchester’s urban development, which is more than can be said for most of the political and intellectual actors claiming to represent the city’s residents. But in allowing recent trends to distract him from the longer history of globalised oppression emanating out from Mancunian capitalism, he loses sight of broader opportunities for struggle and other possibilities for a liberated city, both in Manchester and elsewhere on these islands.

The lines between Manchester’s radical traditions and its capitalist class have frequently been blurred by an opportunist defence of national pride against foreign domination, even in spite of the strength of Black and migrant struggles against exploitation. If we want to transform our city, it’s not enough to reject Manchester’s financialisation, without touching the imperialist structures that make it possible. We have to forge a new common sense, towards a Manchester – and another world on these islands – founded not on imperialist profits, but on the struggles of an underclass that has forged its identities in the crucible of dispossession in all its forms.

References