Port Cities: Comparative Histories of Penang and Manila in Colonial Southeast Asia

This paper uses comparative urban history to examine how Penang and Manila functioned as colonial port cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating the cities as separate case studies, it places them in dialogue through shared themes of urban planning, labour and mobility, and cultural hybridity. Drawing on primary sources including colonial maps, newspaper articles, and reformist essays from La Solidaridad, the study reconstructs how urban space was imagined, governed, and contested in each city. The paper also engages with the comparative frameworks developed by Janet Abu-Lughod and Colin McFarlane, using their ideas to test a transductive approach to comparison that traces how global forces appear differently across local contexts. While Penang developed under British colonial administration oriented around trade and municipal planning, Manila evolved within a Spanish imperial framework shaped by Catholic institutions and reformist political debate. Comparing the two cities reveals both shared pressures generated by imperial networks and distinct local responses to them. By placing Southeast Asian port cities at the centre of comparative urban analysis, this paper argues that they offer valuable insight into how imperial urbanism operated across connected colonial worlds.