The Politics of Place Names: Why Cities Change

What’s in a name? When it comes to the places we live, the answer is: a whole lot of history, power, and identity. You might still find people who refer to India’s bustling financial capital as “Bombay”, or who remember learning about “Peking” in school. These shifts from Bombay to Mumbai, Peking to Beijing, or Salisbury to Harare are not just cosmetic updates on a map. They are potent acts of political and cultural self-definition.

This fascinating intersection of language, politics, and geography is the domain of toponymy, the study of place names. A place’s name, or toponym, is a linguistic fossil, preserving clues about its history, its inhabitants, and who held the power to name it. Let’s delve into the complex and often contentious reasons why cities, and even entire countries, change their names.

The Colonial Echo: Reclaiming a Pre-Colonial Identity

One of the most powerful drivers of place name changes in the 20th and 21st centuries has been decolonization. When European powers colonized vast swathes of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they frequently renamed cities, mountains, and rivers. These new names served two purposes: they honored colonial figures and erased the indigenous identity of the land.

The original names, rooted in local languages and traditions, were often ignored, mispronounced, or anglicized beyond recognition. The act of changing a name back is therefore a profound statement of sovereignty and cultural reclamation.

India provides some of the most famous examples:

• Bombay to Mumbai (1995): The name “Bombay” is believed to be an anglicized version of the Portuguese “Bom Bahia”, meaning “Good Bay”. The change to “Mumbai” restored the name honoring Mumbadevi, the patron goddess of the Koli fishing community, the region’s original inhabitants. It was a clear move by the nationalist Shiv Sena party to shed a colonial legacy and assert a Marathi identity.
• Calcutta to Kolkata (2001): “Calcutta” was the British version of Kalikata, one of the three villages the East India Company purchased in the 17th century. The change to “Kolkata” restored a pronunciation truer to the Bengali language.
• Madras to Chennai (1996): The origin of “Madras” is debated, but it became the name of the British colonial settlement. “Chennai” is thought to derive from the name of a local ruler, restoring an indigenous name to the capital of Tamil Nadu.

This pattern is global. In Zimbabwe, the capital Salisbury (named after the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury) was renamed Harare in 1982, two years after independence. The new name was taken from a local Shona chief, Neharawa, directly connecting the nation’s capital to its pre-colonial past.

Nationalism, Ideology, and Political Upheaval

Beyond decolonization, name changes often signal a dramatic shift in a nation’s political ideology. The fall of a regime or the rise of a new one is frequently cemented by rewriting the map.

Perhaps the most potent example is Russia. The city of St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914 to sound less German at the start of WWI. After Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, it became Leningrad. Then, in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a referendum restored the original name, St. Petersburg, symbolizing a break with the communist era. The same forces saw the city of Stalingrad, site of a pivotal WWII battle, de-Stalinized and renamed Volgograd in 1961.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has a particularly turbulent toponymic history. It went from the Belgian Congo (colonial era) to the Republic of the Congo (independence), then to Zaire under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s campaign of “Authenticité”, and finally back to the Democratic Republic of Congo after Mobutu was overthrown. Each name reflects a monumental political shift.

More recently, in 2022, Turkey formally requested that the United Nations refer to it by its Turkish name, Türkiye. This was a move to control its own international image, dissociating the country from the English word “turkey” (the bird) and asserting its authentic linguistic identity on the global stage.

A Linguistic Shift: When the Name Hasn’t Changed at All

Sometimes, what seems like a name change to outsiders is actually just the adoption of the local name (the endonym) over the foreign one (the exonym).

The classic case is Peking vs. Beijing. The city’s name in Mandarin Chinese hasn’t changed; the difference lies in how Chinese characters are converted into the Latin alphabet (romanization).

• Peking: This spelling is based on an older romanization system developed by French missionaries in the 17th century, influenced by southern Chinese dialects. It reflects how they heard the name pronounced.
• Beijing: This spelling uses Pinyin, the official romanization system adopted by China in 1958 and the international community in the 1980s. “Beijing” (meaning “Northern Capital”) is a much more accurate phonetic representation of the name in modern Standard Mandarin.

So, the Chinese government didn’t change the name of its capital; it simply asked the world to start spelling and pronouncing it correctly according to its own modern standard. The same is true for “Canton” becoming Guangzhou and “Nanking” becoming Nanjing.

The Process and the Pushback

Changing a place name is rarely a simple affair. It’s an official process that can involve legislation, referendums, and formal requests to international bodies like the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN).

Resistance is common. For outsiders, the old name is often just a habit. For locals, a name change can feel like an erasure of their own personal history and memories, regardless of the political motivations. There are also practical concerns: the immense cost of changing signs, maps, official documents, and business branding.

Sometimes, the refusal to adopt a new name becomes a political statement in itself. When the military junta in Burma changed the country’s name to Myanmar in 1989, many Western governments, including the United States and the United Kingdom, continued to use “Burma” for years as a way of not lending legitimacy to the regime. The two names became a geopolitical litmus test.

In the end, place names are far more than just words. They are living, breathing documents that carry the weight of conquest, revolution, and liberation. They tell the story of a people deciding for themselves who they are and how they wish to be known. The next time you see a place name change in the news, look beyond the new spelling. You’re witnessing a culture in the very act of writing its own history.