Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl Nightingale (review)

It is difficult to imagine a larger or more daunting topic of research than segregation. Like historians who have attempted single, integrated narrative histories of development, human rights, or empire, Carl Nightingale has had to wrestle with basic problems of definition—centrally, what is segregation?—even as he has deployed comparative, transnational, and international lenses to explain the color line as it emerged from and transcended local circumstances. Remarkably, Nightingale manages to write a history that is at once coherent and attentive to local difference, detailed and sweeping, accessible and scholarly.

Nightingale begins his lengthy monograph with a series of provocative ideas set out clearly in an introductory chapter. These arguments serve as the organizing ideas that hold together what might otherwise have been a deluge of detail. Briefly, Nightingale contends the following: urban segregation reached back to ancient cities, but racial segregation represented the first moment when “residential segregation created by representatives of a single civilization … spread across the planet” (8); the worldwide high-water mark of segregation was in the early twentieth century; we should abandon the distinction between de facto and de jure when analyzing color lines; some disadvantaged communities could not only resist and protest but sometimes even ignore segregation in their daily lives; any assertion of “voluntary” segregation ought also to include an analysis of power; and segregation always depended upon “semiporous” color lines “authorizing very specific forms of urban boundary-crossing” (13).

The rest of the book is organized in a loose chronology that begins with a quick survey of Eridu in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE and ends with shanty dwellers in South Africa today. With twelve chapters organized into five parts, the book moves rapidly through the first seventy centuries in order to focus more fully on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, for according to Nightingale, “It was only after 1700 that Europeans injected the concepts of color and race into the political dramas of urban space” (44). Part 2 begins the real story, then. By delving into what he believes is the birthplace of modern racial segregation in Madras and probing the London–Calcutta connection in urban planning and urban division, Nightingale essentially tells an origins story for race-based segregation that is rooted firmly in the history of the British—not Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, American, or any other—Empire.¹

Perhaps one of the most subtle and interesting subtexts within each chapter is that of modernization. Nightingale deliberately connects the process of segregation with the emergence of transnational, capitalist, urban real estate markets, the professionalization of growing middle classes, the institutionalization of planning and planners, the evolution and modernization of public health apparatuses, and scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions, among others. This connection between modernization and segregation is a fascinating one, all the more tantalizing because Nightingale does not fully explore it in all its complexity. (To be clear, this is no failure on the part of the book; a study of this magnitude should stimulate questions.) Still, one is left wondering what the dependence of the modern, Anglo-American, urban real estate market on segregation reveals about the evolution of capitalism more broadly, given that not all protocapitalist and capitalist societies evolved in this way. Racial identity formation also remains only partially explored, with the eventual flight of Chinese immigrant miners to Chinatowns discussed without mention of relevant contexts: the experiences of Chinese laborers in the post–Civil War South, the desire of white railroad barons and manufacturers to increase the ranks of cheap laborers, or the whitening of Irish racial identity during the same time period. If races are “the results of diverse historical practices and are continually subject to challenge over their definition and meaning,” as Michael Omi and Howard Winant suggest, then one must ponder how that sort of historical evolution might affect and change the white/nonwhite paradigm...