From Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, New Amsterdam to New York: The politics behind name changes | Research News

Decolonisation

Names have always been tied to power politics, especially in the colonial era, when naming something meant claiming it.

In Guinea: Pointers to the Origin of This Word (1972), MDW Jeffreys, an anthropologist with the British Museum, explores why so many places bear the name Guinea. “The word Guinea itself almost certainly derives from the Berber word for negro, as in, for example, the name Bab Aginaou (Gate of the Negro) in Marrakesh,” he writes. When Portuguese sailors first encountered islands along the West African and South American coasts inhabited by black-skinned people, they applied the name indiscriminately, imprinting their own geography onto foreign lands.

In Historical Geographies of Place Naming: Colonial Practices and Beyond (2023), historian Beth Williamson writes: “Colonialism sought to inscribe order and meaning onto human landscapes through the process of place naming. The imposition or codification of colonial place names reinforced settlers’ claims to land and helped to legitimise territorialisation.”

Rueben Rose-Redwood, Professor at the University of Victoria, expands upon this sentiment in conversation with indianexpress.com. While “colonial cartographers sought to erase indigenous place names from the world map, there have been efforts to publicly reclaim indigenous place names as part of a broader movement of indigenous resurgence and decolonisation.”

Across the globe, renaming cities, streets, and landmarks has been a powerful tool for reclaiming identity and dismantling the legacies of colonialism. According to Rose-Redwood, “in some cases, this has involved reclaiming indigenous place names that pre-date colonial cartography while in other instances colonial place names have been replaced by new nationalistic names arising from independence movements.”

In India, for example, renaming cities has been an attempt to shed the remnants of British rule. Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, reclaiming its name from the Marathi language and the goddess Mumbadevi, worshipped by the city’s original Koli fishing community. Similarly, Calcutta was renamed Kolkata, and Madras became Chennai, each change reflecting a return to local linguistic and cultural roots. These shifts were not merely cosmetic; they were part of a broader movement to redefine the nation’s identity on its own terms.

In Africa, the process of renaming has been equally transformative. After gaining independence in 1980, Zimbabwe changed the name of its capital from Salisbury to Harare, honouring a pre-colonial Shona chief. In South Africa, the end of apartheid brought a wave of renaming aimed at dismantling the symbols of white supremacy. Streets named after colonial figures like Cecil Rhodes were replaced with those honouring anti-apartheid heroes such as Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko.

Soviet Union

During the Soviet era, renaming was a common practice. Guy Puzey, a senior lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, states that while renaming was not unique to the USSR, there it occurred on a large scale, often of whole towns and cities. “It was part of establishing the state ideology more firmly in people’s everyday lives, and a way of signalling change,” he says, adding that there was a “real drive for what we can call commemorative naming, in other words names that paid tribute to certain people or occasions.”

In Russia, name changes reflect the history of power, ideology, and identity.

St Petersberg (Wikimedia Commons)

According to Azaryahu, few cities exemplify this more than St. Petersburg, a city that has been renamed twice in the past century. Established by Peter the Great in the early 18th century, St. Petersburg bore the name of its founder but also carried the unmistakable imprint of European influence.

The Germanic ‘burg’ in its name was a nod to the Westernisation project that defined Peter’s reign. But when World War I erupted and Russia found itself at war with Germany, the name became an unacceptable liability. In 1914, amid rising nationalist fervour, the city was rechristened Petrograd — its suffix altered to the Slavic ‘grad,’ signalling its transformation from a cosmopolitan outpost to an unambiguously Russian stronghold.

Then, in the wake of Lenin’s death in 1924, the city underwent another transformation. Petrograd became Leningrad, an honorific that enshrined the Bolshevik leader’s legacy in the very fabric of the Soviet Union’s urban landscape. Decades later, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, residents voted to restore its original name, St. Petersburg, completing a full circle of historical revision.

The politics of renaming

As Azaryahu notes, the renaming of places has been a tool of statecraft since the French Revolution, when Parisian streets bearing royalist titles were rebranded with republican ideals. This practice, he argues, is a hallmark of modernity — a way for authorities to assert control over history and geography. Every regime change, every shift in political winds, brings with it a new wave of names, each one a declaration of values and vision. From Paris to Pyongyang, the act of renaming is as much about erasure as it is about creation.

In the United States, the politics of naming has taken on new urgency in recent years. The state of Rhode Island, officially known as the ‘State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations’ for nearly four centuries, dropped the latter phrase in 2020 after residents voted to remove a name that evoked the legacy of slavery. Similarly, the US Department of the Interior launched efforts to rename hundreds of geographic features bearing derogatory terms for Native Americans, renaming five places that contained the offensive ‘squaw’ in 2023. These changes are not merely symbolic; they are part of a broader reckoning with the nation’s history of colonialism and racism. As Derek Alderman, Chancellor’s Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee tells indianexpress.com, renaming is a way to “symbolically rewrite America,” redrawing the map to reflect a more inclusive and equitable vision of the country.

According to Puzey, “President Trump certainly seems to grasp the importance of naming,” he says, “with his background in business he is used to treating names as brands, not least his own name, and then the name of America through his election campaigns.

Yet, renaming is rarely straightforward. In 2018, the Republic of Macedonia became North Macedonia, a seemingly minor change that resolved a decades-long dispute with Greece and paved the way for NATO membership. In Cyprus, the division of the island after the Turkish invasion of 1974 led to a stark contrast in naming practices: while the north replaced Greek village names with Turkish ones, the south retained Turkish names as a gesture of unity, even as the island remains politically fractured.

The case of Burma, or Myanmar, illustrates how naming can become a geopolitical flashpoint. In 1989, the military government changed the country’s name to Myanmar, arguing that Burma excluded ethnic minorities and evoked colonial rule. While the United Nations and some countries recognised the change, others, including the United States and Britain, refused, viewing the move as an attempt to legitimise an oppressive regime.

In terms of naming disputes, perhaps the most controversial is that of Derry in Northern Ireland. During the 20th century, Catholics refused to use the British Protestant name Londonderry. As Puzey notes, the place has even been nicknamed stroke city due to the way people sometimes write both names together separated by an oblique stroke (Derry/Londonderry). The fact that the two are used alongside each other however, “may suggest some new ways of acknowledging differences,” according to Puzey.

The complexity of changing a name

Changing a name, whether of a city, a street, or an entire nation, is often perceived as a straightforward act of reclamation or rebranding. But in practice, it is a deeply complex and costly endeavour, fraught with logistical, cultural, and political challenges.

Consider the case of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, a country in southern Africa. In 2018, King Mswati III announced the change to mark the country’s 50th anniversary of independence and to shed the colonial legacy of its old name. While the gesture was symbolic, the practical implications were immense. The name ‘Swaziland’ appeared over 200 times in the constitution. The national airline, currency, and military uniforms all bore the old name. Road signs, postage stamps, and internet domains needed updating. Even international organisations like the United Nations and the Commonwealth had to be notified and updated. The process was neither quick nor cheap, and years later, the transition remains incomplete. The inertia of the old name persists, a reminder of how deeply entrenched such labels can become.

This inertia is not just bureaucratic; it is cultural. Names carry the weight of history and habit. When Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, many residents, particularly older generations, continued to use the old name. Similarly, despite Macedonia’s official renaming to North Macedonia in 2019, many citizens still refer to their country by its former name. These tensions reveal a philosophical dilemma: if a name change is not embraced by the people, has it truly succeeded? As Alderman notes, the power of a name lies not only in its historical reference but also in its connection to place-based heritage — the habits, memories, and daily practices of those who use it.

Beyond the logistical and cultural challenges, renaming carries a significant educational cost. As Alderman points out, changing a name is not just about updating databases. The deeper cost lies in the need to re-educate. When a name changes, so does the way we understand and teach geography, history, and identity. For example, if the Gulf of Mexico were to be renamed the Gulf of America, as some have proposed, it would require not just a shift in terminology but a reimagining of how we conceptualise that space and its historical significance. Additionally, Alderman argues, such a change would have diplomatic implications stating that, “naming the way it’s been done, could, in fact, damage diplomatic relations, or it certainly could create a sour taste in certain people’s mouths.”

Yet, for all its challenges, renaming can also be a powerful act of transformation. As Azaryahu argues, it is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to signal change, with immediate symbolic impact. Whether reclaiming a pre-colonial identity or asserting a new vision for the future, the act of renaming is a declaration of agency. But its success ultimately depends on more than just official decrees; it requires the buy-in of the people whose lives and memories are intertwined with the names they use. As Rose-Redwood remarks, “place naming is a form of world-making that shapes the storyscapes of everyday life.”