Abstract
Written in the closing decade of the twentieth century, Edge of Empire distinguishes itself as one of the first book-length geographical account that takes theories of colonialism and postcolonialism to the material and imaginative spaces of the city. Tracing itineraries from London, the former heart of empire, to the Australian cities of Perth and Brisbane at the geographical edge of empire (and back), Jane Jacobs gives us an erudite and highly readable account of how imperialist ideologies continue to animate the cultural politics that shape the cityscape long after the sun had irrevocably set on the British Empire.
Far from a unitary stable system, colonialism morphed and created multiple and variegated versions of itself across time and space, producing reverberating effects in a postcolonial world “scored by the claws of colonialism, left full of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and liminalities” (Lee and Lam, 1998: 968). As the juggernaut of urban redevelopment, heritage preservation, gentrification, and eco-tourism projects transforms city spaces, it comes face-to-face with what Jacobs calls “the unpredictability of the Other and the inconsistency of the Self” (p. 159). Imperialist (re)inscription in the urban landscape takes many forms, from nostalgic reconstructions that recall imperial might in the City of London, competing visions and commodified displays of multiculturalism in Spitalfields to cultural appropriations of essentialised Aboriginality for an imagined ecological future in Australia. Yet the resurgence of imperialist constructs is also constantly unsettled – coopted, reconfigured, redeployed, challenged, resisted, renegotiated – as part of the politics of identity and place-making in the city. It is in this sense that the title of the book uses the metaphorical “edge,” to gesture towards the persistent ongoingness and constant instability of imperial power and its long shadow across many lands.
As Jacobs’ contemporary, my own engagement with postcolonial theory was focused on a very different kind of colonial city (Singapore’s transition from colonial port-city par excellence to a postcolonial city-state, Yeoh, 1996, 2001). What resonated with me then was Jacobs’ refusal to privilege any one vantage point and commitment to the “recalcitrant but predictable empiricism of the geographer” (p. 6). Part of the book’s attractiveness is the skilful way in which Jacobs weaves a central argument from juxtaposing seemingly disparate studies of urban politics without presupposing what constitutes “the centre” and what defines “its peripheries.” This is not only important for resisting the recentring tendency of postcolonial narratives; the commitment to four sites also opens up space to explore differently configured power relations across different sites in the shifting terrain of postcolonial societies. As Hall (1996: 245) reminds us, “it need not follow that all societies are ‘post-colonial’ in the same way and that in any case the ‘post-colonial’ does not operate on its own but is in effect a construct internally differentiated by its intersections with other unfolding relations.” In my early-career grappling with the contradictions and complicities of postcolonial urbanism, Edge of Empire provided the theoretical and empirical broadening that helped me avoid the excesses of visualising the world through Singapore’s exceptionalism. At the same time, its commitment to move away from grand theorising to attend to the deconstructive possibilities of the local presented a grounded analytical strategy, even if, by some accounts, it did not give enough attention to the “daily microgeographies of place,” or pause sufficiently to listen to the voice to the “views and experiences of postcolonial Others” (Kong, 1998; Mendes-Crabb and Reuter, 1997).
In offering a decentred, multi-sited approach to postcolonial narratives, Edge of Empire, to use Jenny Robinson’s (1998: 185) words, “put something very different, indeed postcolonial, into circulation in a discipline which is having a hard time abandoning its more or less complicit colonial past.” Indeed, scholars working across different domains from urban theory, architectural history to development studies engaged with different aspects of Jacobs’ work. Robinson’s (2013) proposition to “let all cities be ordinary” builds in part from the shared postcolonial critique that urban theorisation must begin by appreciating the distinctiveness of all cities while consciously negotiate the “twin dangers” (p. 60) of blinkered dependency on a limited selection of privileged cities from the global North on the one hand, and the disciplining tendency to order and arrange cities into hierarchical categories on the other. Roy’s (2009) work proposing a “worlding of cities” – a search for “new geographies” in producing urban and regional theory – also harks back to Jacobs’ insights that the “profound edge” does not just lie at the margins, but rather at the heart of the global city.
Beyond urban theory, Edge of Empire also gained traction in various fields including studies of urban place struggles (Escobar, 2001), Indigenous challenges to urban dispossession and displacement (Blomley, 2004), and architectural history (Crinson, 2003). Perhaps where it is most fruitful is when the limitations of Jacobs’ arguments propel critical lines of thought. In the case of development studies, for example, while McEwan (2009: 112–113) agrees with Jacobs on the need to go beyond “theoretical abstractions of postcolonial theory” to engage “the specific, concrete and local conditions of everyday life” to make a difference in real politics, she pushes further to insist that “postcolonial approaches need to engage more with questions of inequality of the power and control of resources, human rights, global exploitation of labour, genocide and so on.” In valorising the politics of identity and the “deconstructive space of the local” (Jacobs, 1996: 158), the postcolonial critique does not go far enough to consider “the relationships and tensions between postcolonialism and global capitalism” (McEwan, 2009: 113), obfuscating “capitalism’s structuring of the modern world” (Dirlik, 1997: 346) and hence blunting its potential for genuine radical resistance.
In “self-consciously [moving] towards a cultural politics of place” (p. 9), Jacobs makes clear her awareness of the risk she was taking (“I also take the risk of presenting and interpreting the views and positionings of those marked as Other in the imperial imagination,” p. 8) and how she responds to the “unavoidable politics of power” (“It means that one’s speaking must be measured by a responsibility to an anticolonial politics,” p. 8). While I did not find it easy to trace the nuts and bolts of what it means to engage with “anticolonial political imperatives” (p. 163) through the pages of Edge of Empire, the book – in terms of the chronological order of my own intellectual biography – foreshadows the critical points taken up in postcolonial geographers’ engagement with Massey’s (2004) formulation of “geographies of responsibility” in underwriting a “progressive sense of place.” These works (see Raghuram and Madge, 2006; Jazeel, 2007, 2014; Raghuram et al., 2009 special issue in Geoforum) suggest that assured accounts of postcolonial politics need to do much more in recognising its own limits, and that “responsible, caring action … involves an openness and vulnerability to that which most resists European thought: those aspects of the ‘other’ that are not shared and are not comfortable” (Noxolo et al., 2012: 424).
In revisiting Edge of Empire, I am reminded that all books are products of their times but as Italo Calvino (2009) famously puts it, “a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” While Jacobs herself did not author another full-length book on “postcolonialism and the city” (and instead turned to architecture and society, high-rise urbanism, and the politics of urban heritage as her core research areas), her work in Edge of Empire highlights the persistence of asymmetrical power relations and enduring injustices that continue to mutate – systematically, but also in rhizomatic fashion – across different but interrelated periods and places. For me, the book represents one of the best demonstrations of how postcolonial approaches come to grips – theoretically and empirically – with deconstructing and diversifying our knowledge of the city, its edges, and undersides. Read from our current preoccupation with decolonising geographical knowledge, the postcolonial critique does not go far enough in disrupting the inequitable structures of academic and policy-oriented knowledge production. Without transformative politics, intellectual decolonisation (through which postcolonialism traces its lineage, see Cullen et al., 2025) risks becoming an impoverished project with no real consequences on the way we live (Raghuram and Sondhi, 2026). But neither should we forget the pioneering journey travelling on the edge of Empire that postcolonial geographers such as Jacobs undertook to get us where we are.
