Introduction

1In the early months of 1718, French explorer Jean-Batiste le Moyne de Bienville stood on the banks of the Mississippi River. According to the directions issued by the Company of the West, he had recently been granted a twenty-five year monopoly over the Louisiana colony and was to establish a settlement “thirty leagues” upriver from the mouth of the Mississippi. The company further directed that the settlement be called Nouvelle Orleans in honor of the Duc d’Orleans, regent to Louis XV. The eventual location, however, owed more to geography and the wisdom of Native Americans than it did to the directors of the company operating from thousands of miles away.1

2To those from such a distance, the idea of a settlement measured from the mouth of the river seemed straightforward. But nothing was straightforward about the geography of the lower Mississippi delta formation. Bienville faced a difficult choice. To meet the strategic requirements of the colony, New Orleans should be close to the mouth of the river. But the quality of the land improved only by going farther upriver than the directors had mandated. The solution grew from the knowledge of local Native Americans, who showed Bienville a possible compromise. By utilizing a series of bays and passes off of the Gulf of Mexico, one could reach the Mississippi River via a “back door”. Landing on the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and using Bayou St. John to travel inland, water transport could avoid the navigational challenges of the hazardous delta region and the long journey upstream. Bayou St. John would bring Bienville to a point only a short, two-mile journey from the banks of the river.

3The land chosen for New Orleans and subsequently settled – on the northeast side of a large, crescent-shaped bend – was far from ideal. But frequent flooding and the subsequent silt deposits had for many years built up the land along the river and interior bayous. Hardwood trees had taken root, and an expanse several hundred yards back from the Mississippi River toward the lake was sufficiently well-drained to allow for the start of a primitive settlement. Bienville had made his choice. From the beginning, New Orleans would be a compromise between its hazardous site and its strategic situation.2

4Among the drawbacks of Bienville’s site were poor soil (mostly organic material with an abnormally high water table), diseases (especially those carried by mosquitoes), semi-tropical weather, and lack of fresh water made up for only in part by frequent rain and storms. Even the location along the river – so important for subsequent transportation, commerce and strategic advantage – hampered the new settlement. Spring floods were common; the banks shifted often, and breaks in the natural levees could immobilize the settlement for weeks at a time. Gulf storms would arise with no warning and threaten the very existence of New Orleans. The young settlement suffered from hurricanes in 1719, 1722, 1732 and 1733.

5An impressive array of advantages counterbalanced this depressing list of problems. First and foremost for the French, the new city constituted a crucial strategic linchpin in its effort to compete within the New World’s rush for empire. Forty years before the founding of the city, the king’s instructions to the explorer LaSalle mentioned the advantage Louisiana enjoyed as a “way to penetrate into Mexico.”3 To the south, west and east were the Spanish; to the northeast and north were the British. The funnel-shaped, French-claimed Mississippi Valley ended in Bienville’s small strip of semi-land precariously wedged between Spanish settlements. Whatever the eventual commercial possibilities, the city represented a geopolitical reality that gave France credibility and presence on the central Gulf coast. The colony avoided the worst of Gulf hurricanes by virtue of its location somewhat away from the coast. Communication and local commerce took advantage of multiple river, lakes and bayous. The climate, though uncomfortable, promoted verdant growth for consumption and, eventually, export. Neither the difficulties of site nor the advantages of situation would dominate the colonial period of the city’s history. The two aspects remained in tension throughout the eighteenth century.

6The French experience in New Orleans and the larger Louisiana colony must be judged a failure.4 The declining fortunes of the French in the New World and Europe and defeats in the colonial wars discouraged both overseas investment and regal ambitions, and in 1762, the French ceded the colony to the Spanish. The French rule of forty-four years, however, established long-lasting characteristics of the city’s social, religious and economic structure.

• Colonists imported slaves within one year of its founding. French colonial attitudes moderated racial interactions as compared with Anglo practices elsewhere on the continent.

• German settlers joined in the colonial experiment and became part of the early ethnic mix in the city and its environs.

• Methodical importation of religious orders, especially the Ursuline nuns and Jesuits, reinforced Catholicism’s influence on New Orleans.

• The French authorities began extensive public works, including fortifications at the corners of the Vieux Carré, and, most important, the construction of artificial levees.

7By the time of the onset of Spanish rule New Orleans, had grown only modestly from its small beginning. In the late 1760s, the Spanish assumed responsibility for slightly over 2,500 residents, nearly one-third of whom were slaves. An attempt to characterize the city at this point in its history – was it a world city? global? – seems fruitless. New Orleans was a colonial outpost and important not so much because of its size but because of its strategic location and commercial potential. But the population numbers were low, and French ambitions for a great and orderly colonial city had disappeared. However, the remainder of the colonial period resulted in more rapid growth and the establishment of New Orleans within a world system of cities.

8The first concern of the Spanish was their ability to govern the disgruntled residents. A serious rebellion resulted in armed conflict and subsequent executions.5 The lengthy colonial experience of the Spanish produced a competent administration, and the city residents adjusted to the new rulers. Additional settlers came to the colony, including Spanish from other settlements and the Islenos – Canary Islanders – who settled along the lower part of the Mississippi River. Thus the diversity of population in the city received additional elements. The Spanish governor Carondelet supervised the construction of a navigation canal that brought the waters of Bayou St. John to the northern edge of the Vieux Carré.

World City Status

9One of ironies that delight historians of New Orleans, that supposed quintessential French city, is that it was under the Spanish rule, especially in the last decade of the 1700s, that the future claim of New Orleans to “world” status began to take shape. During most of the 1700s, the immediate New Orleans hinterland – an area of population perhaps three to four times that of the city – raised tobacco and indigo for export in addition to providing crops and livestock for city consumption. But the nature of the hinterland changed dramatically in the 1790s, which raised the profile of New Orleans and strengthened the argument for its classification as a world city.

10The first element of that transformation occurred as a result of the successful revolution of the American colonies. Freed from their constraints, the cities and former colonies along the eastern seaboard generated westward-bound settlers and a gradual but steady increase in trans-Appalachian migration. The difficult east-west journey inhibited continued commercial contact between the new settlers and their former homes. Once across the mountains, settlers found numerous rivers that fed into the Mississippi and, from there, downriver to New Orleans. The new American administrations pressed the Spanish and received permission to utilize the city as a depository for goods soon to be shipped abroad. Spain gained leverage with its neighbor, and New Orleans gained importance as a world systems participant. The city’s hinterlands now extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and eastward to the western slope of the Appalachians.

11The second transformation of the city’s hinterlands occurred closer to New Orleans. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which drastically reduced the labor necessary to process the fibers. The result transformed the American south, not least by making the slavery system immensely profitable. As cotton production spread south and west from the older southern colonies, that industry’s center of gravity came closer and closer to New Orleans. The seaboard ports of Charleston and Savannah, over time, became secondary to New Orleans as transshipment points. The economic hinterlands of New Orleans now included the cotton-producing lands of the Deep South.

12The third transformation of the New Orleans hinterlands occurred even closer to the city. In 1795, Jean Etiene de Boré perfected the granulation of sugar. Productive lands west of New Orleans and along the Mississippi cultivated sugar cane and further enriched the city. The sugar lands were not as extensive as the Mississippi Valley or the cotton lands of the Deep South. But the production increased agricultural productivity, located important economic functions within the city and added significantly to the growing role of New Orleans in the world economy. All three elements of the transformation of the hinterlands occurred during the last years of Spanish rule.

13The growing commercial importance of New Orleans attracted the attention of the United States. Fearful of its ability to control the colony, the Spanish returned Louisiana to France in 1800. France’s revived imperial pretensions coincided with growing Spanish weakness and, for a brief period, it seemed that New Orleans would return to its colonial roots. However, in the early 1790s, the French colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a slave revolt, which grew in intensity for over a decade. By 1802, Napoleon’s weariness of overseas burdens coincided with American comercial interests, and the parties reached a historic agreement in 1803. Napoleon sold not only New Orleans but all of Louisiana to the United States. He received cash for his military adventures and created a bulwark against renewed British ambitions. For the United States, the purchase meant an enormous expansion of U.S. lands and the acquisition of the commercial, transportation, financial and strategic linchpin to the Mississippi Valley. The entry of New Orleans into the United States elevated the city to world status.

14The subsequent process of assimilating the colonial population into the American culture proved very difficult. The largely Francophone culture resented the Americans, and the new administrators returned the feelings with interest. The territorial leadership expected immediate help in defending themselves against raids by Native Americans and in the possible conflict with the British in Florida. But New Orleanians, and to a lesser extent the residents of the colony outside of the city, resisted military service and the new Anglo-centric culture. It was not until the successful Battle of New Orleans in early 1815 that the city truly joined the U.S.

15The ethnic bickering and cultural differences did not obscure the commercial possibilities. The city continued to transform without interruption from the time of the Louisiana Purchase until the American Civil War. Even before Louisiana became a state in 1812, New Orleans took its place among the largest cities of the U.S. – seventh in rank according to the 1810 census – with a population of over 17,000.6

16The argument that the city achieved “world” status during this era refers not only to the modern criteria for world cities, but also to a more historical viewpoint based on the city’s role in both economic and political life during the period starting in the 1790s and continuing well into the twentieth century. During this period, New Orleans qualified as a world city. The arrival of the Americans in 1803 transformed the city from an outpost of the empire into a crucial cog in both the American western expansion and the American south’s economic growth. Its role as a world city flowed from the importance of cotton production and the international realignments of the textile trade.

Urban History and City Classification

17When a bandwagon comes along, historians are often the last to jump aboard. The profession often resists the latest academic fads and fancies, content to utilize the well-proven paradigms. This tendency toward skepticism is partially explained by temperament. After years of looking for evidence and marshalling arguments, historians are reluctant to jettison the comfortable, to learn the new vocabulary and, perhaps, to engage in a new set of arguments. Particularly in the case of paradigms originating outside of their profession, historians are reticent to join discussions in which they may only be tangentially connected and, perhaps, only partially educated. To venture into the global cities debate is daunting. New acronyms, new statistics (capital flows, labor market analysis) and new jargon (globalization-urbanization nexus, e. g.) pose a challenge to scholars.

18An additional, more serious, explanation involves avoidance of presentism. “Now” is not the same as “then”, and judgments formed in the present cannot be retroactively applied to the past. The term “global cities” is not only of recent vintage, but is fraught with methodological and value assumptions.

19Through much of the Twentieth Century, the study of urbanism and urban development in America has been constrained by the view of cities in the U.S. in local or regional, as opposed to global, contexts. Geographic dispersion in the U.S. did not encourage the consideration of international trade and the growth of world systems. For many decades, there were only a few exceptions to this general observation. Cities on the Atlantic seaboard, of course, were part of the Atlantic trade patterns, and even elementary school children in the United States learned of the triangular trade. And for scholars of slavery, the trade in human beings necessarily drove the study of the larger Atlantic World to include Africa and the Caribbean.

20European scholars of urban history and urban studies focused on urban developments according to their geographical realities and historical influences as well. The compressed European continent immediately drew scholars to questions of international trade, and studies that looked to the Third World almost invariably focused on issues of colonialism and former colonies. A measure of convergence between the two groups of scholars did not occur until the 1970s, a point at which American scholarship turned to a critique of the political economy, a byproduct of foreign policy revisionism and New Left enthusiasm.7

21Diane Davis identifies other features dividing U.S. and European scholarship, worth quoting at length:

“Some of [the differences] may have to do with the anti-urban political culture [in the U.S.] and […] the history of immigration/migration and the ways in which US urban research so readily morphed into ethnic and racial studies […]. In Europe, in contrast, scholarship on urban dynamics seemed to have maintained a higher visibility and more sustained intellectual salience […] the indisputable importance of cities in European politics and culture, […] or possible even the continued salience of Marxist scholarship in which the cities are identified as the site of capitalist accumulation and class dynamics.”8

22American urban historians tend to focus their studies of urban history on issues of race, segregation, segregation of housing, ethnic groups, social history, etc.. The study of urban history in the U.S. is often the study of a city’s biography. Like the study of individual biography, this is often fascinating, sometimes valuable, but unfortunately incomplete. For these reasons and others, much of the scholarly conversation regarding world cities and global cities bypassed the history profession. Sociologists, urban planners, urban studies experts and economists have been at the forefront of the new concepts.

23The decade of the 1980s was an important transitional period in urban scholarship. The seemingly intractable problems of Third-World poverty and the pathologies of urban areas in much of the post-colonial world focused attention on transnational trends and processes. Interest in particular cities waned – as did the interest in the operations of national, regional and local political and economic processes – as questions of globalization grew. The fall of the Berlin Wall accelerated the trend. Neo-Marxism was on the defensive, and in the years that followed, there were few to challenge the primacy of enhanced neoliberalism, the famous (or infamous) consensus of the mid-1990s. From academia to the International Monetary Fund to the World Bank to corporate media, investigations and scholarly research turned not only to globalization but also to what seemed to be the shining examples of global success.

24The trend was not entirely new. Earlier urban research had focused on large cities and trading networks. More than 100 years ago, British writers used the term “world city” to refer to Liverpool and London. Patrick Geddes, mentor to Lewis Mumford, employed the same phrase in 1915.9 At about the same time, the phrase “imperial city” referred to a lesser number of metropolitan areas with more specific criteria. Andrew and Lynn Hollen Lees quote the Pall Mall Gazette’s 1886 coverage of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Celebration and its self-satisfied designation of London as an “imperial city”. They suggest a four-part classification of imperial cities based on their research into nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. Cities were imperial if they were capitals of empires (London, Paris, Brussels, etc.), capitals of multinational territories (Vienna), or active centers in overseas trade (Liverpool, Hamburg, Rotterdam). The fourth criterion looked backward in time. A city was also imperial if it met none of the contemporary criteria, but qualified because of its “historic and symbolic importance”. Thus Rome, deficient in the other categories, merited the title imperial in a tribute to its span of control of many centuries ago. Thus, by the advent of the middle of the 1980s, the various scholarly professions had run through much of the possible vocabulary of urban taxonomy – world city, imperial city and primate city, a special case designating one dominant urban area within a country, often to the detriment of development elsewhere in that nation.10

The Golden Age of New Orleans

25Can the development of the city be explained as a function of these designations? For example, was New Orleans a world city, and if so, when? Based on the evidence from the nineteenth century, the answer is yes. The trans-Appalachian expansion, the development of King Cotton and the rise of the sugar industry, combined with demographic and other commercial trends, do qualify New Orleans as a world city.

26Bienville’s choice of location for New Orleans made more and more sense as shipping and techniques of navigation improved. Although the Lake Pontchartrain route remained useful for coastal trade, the river took on greater importance. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, most trade to and from the port involved the U.S. eastern seaboard and totaled approximately $2 million. By the mid-1830s, the majority of trade involved overseas ports and was valued at $54 million.11 Much of the increase mirrored the growth of the cotton trade. U.S. cotton production in 1800 totaled 36.5 million pounds. By 1840, that production had grown to over 670 million pounds, feeding the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution.12 The colonial exports of tobacco, rice and indigo continued, but they were overtaken and eventually dwarfed by the sugar and cotton trade. Raw materials left the port to be shipped directly to Europe or to be transshipped from the eastern U.S.; returning ships brought manufactured goods to the newly enriched city and hinterlands. The early decades of the 1800s saw the development and exploitation of steamboats, crucial to the expansion of the river trade. Steamboat visits to New Orleans grew from twenty-one in 1814 to over 1,200 in 1834.13 One source suggests that New Orleans was the world’s fourth busiest port in the year 1840.14

27The new prosperity profoundly affected the development of the city. Intent on supplanting (or duplicating) the features of the Creole city, the new Anglo arrivals expanded upriver from the French Quarter into the American Sector and located places of business and townhomes on streets with Anglo-friendly names. The compact walking city of the Vieux Carré gave way to clusters of related businesses in the “sugar” or “cotton” district. Factors, shippers, lawyers, bankers and insurance salesmen – all of the middlemen of the growth industries – transformed the city. The new business elite replaced the obsolescent Carondelet Canal with the New Basin Canal, which ran from the shore of Lake Pontchartrain to the back of the Anglo business district. Anglo businessmen used Irish labor to build the canal rather than risk the valuable capital investment inherent in the slaves. The Irish remained and transformed a riverside working-class district into the Irish Channel. To mimic the elegant Place-d’Armes (Jackson Square) in the Vieux Carré, the American sector developed Lafayette Square with its own array of statuary, government buildings and surrounding churches. By 1820, the New Orleans population of over 27,000 ranked fifth in the U.S.; within twenty more years, the population of over 100,000 ranked the city third in the U.S. only a few hundred behind Baltimore.15

28The city’s growth transformed living patterns, spatial differentiation and transportation corridors – all according to standard U.S. urban models, yet within the geographical constraints peculiar to the city. Instead of concentric circles of development, for example, one finds vectors upriver along relatively high and well-drained ground. Similarly, during the mid-1800s, the city expanded downriver and along the Esplanade ridge and interior bayous north and east towards the lake. But the land toward the north of the great river crescent remained the province of the marginalized and poor.

29Railroads were an early feature of New Orleans. The Pontchartrain Railroad brought passengers and freight from the shore of Lake Pontchartrain down present-day Elysian Fields Avenue toward the French Quarter and the river. More typical of early commuter lines, the New Orleans and Carrolton Railroad serviced well-to-do New Orleanians seeking escape from the city. Uptown residential areas arose early in the 1830s and 1840s as the walking city slowly transitioned to a more familiar U.S. urban pattern.

A City’s Decline

30This picture of nineteenth century New Orleans as a world city, however, remains incomplete. In the midst of the prosperity and growth of what historians still refer to as the city’s golden age, we can detect the onset of relative, though not absolute, decline. It is convenient to use the American Civil War as the watershed event between prosperity and subsequent impoverishment, but the story is more subtle and complex.

31Early in the Crescent City’s rise to world status, a signal event in the northeast U.S. marked a change in economic patterns of the greater hinterlands of New Orleans. In 1825, engineers completed the Erie Canal, which opened the Great Lakes and the upper midwest to New York and the East Coast. No longer would New Orleans enjoy exclusive access to the population and commerce of those lands. No dramatic shifts in business took place, and the volume of river trade obscured the new reality.

32Furthermore, by the 1850s, U.S. population figures reveal a changing pattern. The commercial and shipping centers of the country were about to lose rank compared with the nascent manufacturing centers. As industrialization grew in the U.S., labor demand fueled population growth, which set the pattern of growth of urban centers well into the twentieth century. The thesis here is simple: New Orleans fell from the first rank of world cities due to its failure to develop manufacturing along with its commercial strengths. And as the city’s comparative advantage in commerce declined, there was little to take its place. This was not immediately apparent to the business elites of the antebellum city, who still enjoyed significant growth in the 1840s and 1850s. Cotton exports from the U.S. tripled between 1840 and 1860, New Orleans accounting for perhaps one-third of the total.

33The lack of industrial development in New Orleans is a subset of a larger historical investigation regarding the American south in general.

• Labor: The South’s dependence on slave labor distorted the market and discouraged industrial investment. Under the Free soil Party, the working class whites agitated against slavery and formed an important component of the new Republican Party in the 1850s.

• Opportunity cost and investment strategies: The high profits available in cotton and the plantation system discouraged alternative investments. With few exceptions, both economic choice and racial ideology constrained the vast number of slaves to rural, agricultural pursuits. If the south was not anti-urban, there was at least a significant view that the urban setting destroyed discipline, encouraged slave education and independence and promoted dangerous multiracial notions of equality. New Orleans represented the epitome of the dangerous urban area in such arguments.

• Ideology: The dominant Old South ideology glorified rural life and agriculture. The Republic ideal of the yeoman farmer transformed from the Jeffersonian ideal became associated not only with slavery and racial superiority but also with landscape, density and occupation. The trauma of the American Civil War only partially undermined these attitudes and beliefs.

34In the case of New Orleans, particular local conditions exacerbated the more general southern attitude toward industrialization. The city’s prosperity masked the longterm trends, and only an extraordinarily prescient business class might have accurately predicted the dangers ahead. In addition, one can return to Bienville’s selection of a city site. The swampy conditions in and around the city inhibited population growth and the city’s potential as a possible site for large-scale manufacturing. Though the population continued to increase, the city’s rank in the U.S. had fallen to tenth by 1880, the last time New Orleans found itself among the top ten U.S. cities.17

35One other factor is important. The geographical advantages of New Orleans in the first half of the 1800s were connected to the river trade. As U.S. transportation shifted more heavily toward railroads, the city’s advantages declined. Post-Civil-War river trade remained important. Engineering improvements at the mouth of the river and an extensive rebuilding of port facilities in the period from1900 to 1920 has sustained commerce in the Crescent City even to the present day. But the great railroad expansion of the post-Civil-War era created new hubs of commerce to the detriment of News Orleans’s relative position, e. g., Atlanta, Fort Worth/Dallas, and Houston.

36The lack of industrialization and the rise of other commercial centers did not relegate New Orleans to backwater status. The discovery of oil in southwestern Louisiana at the turn of the century, the periodic expansion of the cotton trade, the exploitation of coastal hardwood forests and the development of the intracoastal canal system all contributed toward a modest level of growth into the mid-twentieth century. But the days of New Orleans as a world economic power were over.

The Global City Label

37In the late twentieth century, New Orleans could not compete in the new category of global city. The term gained currency in the 1980s and early 1990s as the result of several trends: Interest in emerging economies in the developing world was strong, and the works of John Friedmann and Anthony King drew upon this research to present a discussion of world cities.18 But interest in global cities was not only the logical result of incremental research. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemingly confirmed the victory of not only western political ideology, but also of the neoliberal economic system. In 1991, Saskia Sassen published The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.19 The focus changed from the examination of Third World cities and the search for evolutionary processes that might explain urbanization. Instead, scholars now examined the winners in the new neoliberal world.

38The new focus on global cities encompasses at least three problematic areas:

1. Criteria

39Consider the following statement:

“But all cities are not created equal, and all cities do not grow to equal stature. Some are big but impoverished in both brains and money. Some once stood on the economic heights but today languish further down the slopes, their glory days behind them. Some are the cities of the future, but not quite yet. Then there are global cities. These are the ports of the global age, the places that both run the global economy and influence its direction. The cities where decisions are made, where the world’s movers and shakers come to exchange the latest news and information. They are the places that boast both old-fashioned power and new fashioned flair […]. In a word, they have clout.”20

40The somewhat breathless description comes from a publication titled The Urban Elite, published by AT Kearney Consulting in cooperation with Foreign Policy magazine and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Their research ranks the top sixty-five global cities according to five criteria: business activity (30%), human capital (30%), information exchange (15%), cultural experience (15%), and political engagement (10%).21

41The Institute for Urban Strategies of the Mori Memorial Foundation in Japan published a similar listing titled Global Power City Index 2010. It uses similar criteria, including economy, research and development, cultural interaction, livability, ecology and natural environment and accessibility. Sir Peter Hall served as Principal Advisor to the study, and Saskia Sassen contributed as a member of the Steering Committee.22 Similarly, Friedmann’s 1986 criteria are explicitly economic/financial: a global city must be a center of major financial activities; it must have headquarters of transnational corporations (TNCs), international institutions, a rapid growth of business services, a manufacturing center; it must be a transportation node and have a certain population size.23

42The individual data points involved in these analyses can be problematic. Much data is collected on a national basis and not disaggregated according to city. In addition, the collection of city-only data versus metropolitan area data can confuse the analysis. Specific data points include the number of transnational headquarters, the number of bank deposits and even the number of billionaires that reside in the city. This last statistic, curiously, skews some rankings toward Moscow, home to the world’s greatest number of resident billionaires.24 One other criterion for global status is the extent of airport facilities and national/international flight connections.25

2. Ideology

43The rush of consultants and policy-makers toward classification of cities may obscure ideological assumptions that underpin the global cities debate. After all, which city does not want to be identified as “global”? But Friedmann’s hypothesis regarding world/global cities and Sassen’s thesis go beyond the incidentals of urban size, corporate headquarters and capital flows. Global cities, it seems, share characteristics that are less appealing. Social changes of a clearly non-egalitarian nature hide behind technocratic language. Such cities experience the restructuring of land prices, divisions of labor and increases in cost of living. Those not engaged in global producer services experience an expansion of informal labor (part time, without benefits, contracts) and a driving down of wages. This is clearly the picture of late twentieth century neoliberal doctrine. Historians need not participate in this debate, but they cannot ignore the loaded meaning of “global city” in an investigation of the usefulness of the term within the profession.

3. Dichotomous Labeling

44Once subjected to the criteria of these new scholars, cities find themselves within the new elect or on the outside looking in. Cities can move up and down the list, but the effect seems clear. What can result is a scrambling on the part of the “non-global” cities to qualify for entrance to the club. Lists are not subtle instruments. A city is either on the list or not. Numerous articles argue for the inclusion of one city or another within the global sphere: Charlotte, North Carolina,26 Lexington, Kentucky,27 Birmingham, England,28 and Miami, Florida.29

Conclusion

45So in what sense (if at all) is New Orleans a “global city”? It clearly does not qualify according to the criteria mentioned above. Its post-Hurricane Katrina population barely places it among the top fifty U.S. cities, though the greater metropolitan area exceeds one million. The city lacks corporate headquarters, and manufacturing remains weak. The concentration of higher education institutions is a plus on the human capital rankings, but general education levels remain low. New Orleans’exhibiting some of the unfortunate patterns of income inequality in global cities does not alone qualify the city as global. It does suggest, however, that such income disparities are not limited to the global city designees. The ports of New Orleans and adjacent jurisdictions are quite active, but their international ranking depends highly on bulk shipments of crude oil and petroleum products rather than on manufactured goods.

46Perhaps there is an alternative set of criteria for a global city, one with a more historical point of view. Some cities – not just New Orleans – have sustained world, if not global, status through the sum of their history, through their cultural contributions and their place in memory. Can any sensible list of global cities composed by a historian ignore Florence? Or St. Petersburg? Or Venice? Any claim New Orleans maintains to status as a global city is based on its history and distinctiveness within the United States. It joins a number of other urban areas – Manchester, Athens, Lisbon, Quebec – which occupy a prominent place in popular imagination, but whose economies and political importance have declined. One can imagine an alternative set of criteria, some kind of historians’counterweight to the neoliberal ideals. In the historians’view, global cities should exhibit distinctive architecture and a persistent local culture that has made some contribution to the culture of the larger world. These are cities which once played a role in the world system and which preserve the evidence of their former status. These cities have distinctive cuisines, immigration patterns and languages. Above all, these cities have a past that is honored, celebrated and sustained.

47The exploitation of memory and residual affection has, of course, become big business. Selling the past may seem cynical and manipulative, but there must be some basis in fact for the ploy to work at all. New Orleans is a city whose authentic economic and commercial world status has passed. The transfer of most oil company operations to Houston in the past twenty years is perhaps the final marker in that process. But New Orleans remains a world city in important cultural and historical ways. Its historical preservation is exemplary, especially in U.S. terms. The post-Katrina culture thrives – not only as a museum-like method of preserving the past, but also as a vibrant, evolving present. The city’s role serves a cautionary function – in times of prosperity do not neglect development for the future. It is possible to enjoy world status and then to decline. But the role of New Orleans is also celebratory – as it serves as an example of how to honor the past, preserve culture and remain vibrant. If the concept “global city” is to have meaning for historians, the profession must honor that past as well.