Abstract
The books under review focus on changes in port cities as part of the process of globalization. The primacy of port cities is indisputable. In the first era of globalization, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Venice, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Seville, Naples, Istanbul, Bordeaux, London, and Bristol transformed the relations between governments and an urban order that had been based on feudal ties and the collection of taxes from agriculture. The 1880s-1940s saw the transformation of the Northern Range, Europe’s maritime façade on the North Sea, into the cockpit of international trade and imperial conflict, ending with the remarkable if short-lived moment in 1945 when New York controlled fifty percent of world trade. The third era, which began with the end of the Cold War and was shaped by deep political and legal changes to the rules affecting trade, competition and investment in developed, and subsequently in most developing, countries is qualitatively different insofar as globalization has wrought the transformation of cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well as within the existing network of Atlantic and Pacific cities. Every future history of urban life since 1990 will have to take the primordial status of port cities into account. They are not a subtype of city, but the ur-type, without which life in other cities that do not have maritime functions would be all but impossible to understand in economic and social terms.
With one exception, on the seventeenth century, the books under review concentrate primarily on events, trends and developments during the third era of globalization, roughly datable from the onset of containerization of freight and prefabrication of ships since the 1970s. This essay will ask the question what the impact of urban change around the world as a result of globalization implies for the studying and writing of urban history now and for the foreseeable future, as living experience passes into the realm of memory and archives, as actors change jobs and retire, as scholars in the future who were too young to know firsthand what happened in Shanghai or Hamburg or Vancouver in the 1990s take an interest in those places when they become historical subjects, and as the public—civil society—takes greater responsibility for their cities’ future. This question should be the subject of widespread reflection and debate: the last word will not be said for quite a while. The future of urban history was not the primary focus of the many scholars who edited and contributed to the volumes under review, but it was not far from the vision of many, whose roles as historians and geographers often blur with that of urban and political critics and advocates.
Each book is the result of a journey, literally. Scholars were brought—by air, of course—to present papers or lectures, to meet and confront one another, to listen and to learn. More than fifty-five individuals were brought together by several foundations and universities spanning the Pacific and Atlantic. The undertaking was global, a contribution to the making of a community for scholarship. Transforming Urban Waterfronts was the product of a 2008 conference of the International Network of Urban Waterfront Research, held in Hamburg; Leonard Blussé traveled from Leiden to Cambridge, MA, to deliver the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures in 2006; Carola Hein benefited from an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grant and organized a session on port cities at a conference of the European Association of Urban Historians in Lyon in 2008 and a conference at her home institution, Bryn Mawr College, with the support of a Mellon Tri-Co Seed Grant; Seascapes began as a research conference in 2003 at the Library of Congress as an effort to focus on the links between regions in area studies, an objective with origins in the American Historical Association several years earlier; a 2004 ASEF workshop in Hamburg on port cities and city-states in Asia and Europe was the springboard of the volume edited by Graf and Huat. The many organizers and sponsors deserve recognition for their support for interdisciplinary and cross-regional scholarship, and for embracing topics that are more contemporary than historical. The long lead time to prepare grant proposals; organize workshops and conferences; mobilize scholars who themselves must make time to carry out research, secure support, and complete an essay; and to prepare the collective output for publication, however, clearly puts the social sciences and humanities at a comparative disadvantage to the sciences. Three or four years appear to be the norm. One of the consequences is that the impact of any one set of essays on the larger community of scholars with related interests is blunted.
Each book is the result of a different hypothesis or conceptual framework, either implicit or explicit. Seascapes (pp. 2–3) brought together three dozen scholars to see “what would happen if ocean-oriented scholars were brought together, not around a single body of water, but across far-flung places and times.” The resulting body of papers broke down into groups: critical constructs for maritime studies (islands, littorals, ships, and sea space); empires based on the efforts of territorial states to project power; sociologies on ship or at port; and maritime transgressors, smugglers, or pirates. This classification could broadly cover all the works under review, albeit with different degrees of emphasis. Seascapes however paid more attention to oceans and to state power relations, emphasizing the scope for future work on oceans “as objects of knowledge and as sites where knowledge is produced and circulated.” New geographical knowledge gets included, and the editors of Seascapes acknowledge that “most current categories of social analysis were initially developed to understand land-based societies,” but none of these works dealt with hydrology or engineering of ports and coasts, or with maritime or environmental science: scholars with such critical and wide-ranging questions as these will find much of interest in recent and back issues of Isis and Technology and Culture. Clearly, interdisciplinarity seems to have a more literary than technical, scientific, or quantitative bent.
Carola Hein introduces Port Cities—grounds it, one wants to say—with a “networked analysis of port cityscapes,” especially the connections between the global (trade networks) and local (urban form, built environment). The result is a well-documented and illustrated set of chapters that takes the reader literally around the world. But the underpinnings of the empirical, descriptive chapters rest too narrowly atop a bibliography that could be much deeper and broader. Edward Fox’s illuminating treatment of the history of France according to inland or maritime trade and power, History in Geographic Perspective (1977) and Chandra Mukerji’s Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (1997), are not referenced; nor is Andre Vigarie’s Ports de commerce et vie littorale (1977). And this book has perhaps the best bibliography of them all. France in general, which faces the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the North Sea and whose territories also lie in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and across the Atlantic, gets a miss in most of these volumes, which are based on the networks among scholars who are engaged on related topics in similar ways, rather than on a top–down, global sense of which port cities are most interesting or relevant to illuminate wider phenomena. The assumption seems to be that with the right methodology, almost any port city can yield something of value—which is no doubt true. But the shortcomings of collected works that are always remarked upon in any review such as this nevertheless must be noted.
Networks are also key to Transforming Urban Waterfronts, whose editors organized a series of papers “to present fixities and flows of waterfront transformation processes . . . from both theoretical and empirical perspectives . . . to better understand the ways that fixities and flows have manifested themselves in a range of cases: global and local dynamics, nature-society relations, and new practices of land development” (p. 11). I thought better to quote from the editors rather than try to put what I think they mean into my own words. There may be many chapters in any of these volumes of interest to other urban historians who do not share the same predilection to look through a specific methodological lens, but without a search engine it would be all but impossible to know in which book to find material on Hamburg, and in which on London.
The stellar exception is Visible Cities, which is about the negotiated relations among Asian and Western peoples in port cities as these are mediated by states. From Leonard Blussé we understand how different were Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia as trading ports and as places of contact; we learn of the contingencies that led to the opening or closing of one or the other, its assimilation into a national or maritime regime. We follow traders and diplomats to see what impact the entry of American and European powers and interests—engaged with political and industrial changes in Atlantic civilizations—had on the existing maritime networks in the China Seas. Blussé argues at the end that until the establishment of the free port of Singapore in 1842, the ability of Japan and China to regulate maritime commerce in their ports remained unchallenged. Singapore therefore would be a classic example of what Lewis Mumford referred to as the city as an emergent, modifying existing relationships and orders. But that, as Blussé says, is another story. This is the book I would most want to re-read, to enjoy the characters and situations of a pre-modern, pre-industrial era which was not wholly independent of great power politics but in which the sphere of an individual’s influence was on the scale of a picaresque hero. Narrative and interpretation fuse elegantly. Visible Cities covers a maritime era which subsequently ended, whereas the other books under review, focused largely on the contemporary, are dealing with what is widely believed to be a new era. We shall see whether this in fact turns out to have been the case.
These works are not urban biographies, or narratives organized around the lives and actions of merchants, shipbuilders and dockers, city councilmen, medical practitioners interested in tropical or contagious diseases, artists and writers who represented ports, ships and life on the quay, fleet commanders, or fortifications engineers. There are exceptions: mercantile elites in Part Two of Port Cities (ed. Hein) with chapters by Sakis Gekas and Mathieu Grenet on Mediterranean ports and the theme of cosmopolitanism, and by Huibert Schijf on Amsterdam and Rotterdam on the tensions of urban rivalry, by Celine Fremaux on Suez and Malte Fuhrmann on Ottoman cities, all focusing on the nineteenth century; the chapters on representation in Port Cities in Europe and Asia by Yvonne Schulz Zinda, Arndt Graf, and Chua Beng Huat respectively cover the image of Shanghai in Chinese film, the marketing of Hamburg and Singapore, and cultural policy in Singapore. To some extent, there is an inverse relationship between a focus on the empirical, which is particular, and the need to relate the unique to the overarching theme chosen for a collective volume: the local and contingent tends to escape from the net, drawing attention on its own. The works under review draw on traditional research methods, including archival, but transposed, if you will, to a different drumbeat. Because of the methodological focus as the prime mover, each book is composed of essays and articles that look inward, toward one another, rather than outward, toward other, and different, methodological or conceptual frameworks. As a result, the interconnections and crossovers have to be teased out. The effort to impose some kind of methodological order on their study tends to make each book somewhat more introspective and less, well, cosmopolitan, than should be the case when port cities are under discussion. The contact between cultures and people was the subject of many, but studied within parameters that seem overly rigid.
With social science history, scholars are more likely to select and analyze evidence in the light of a hypothesis, and perhaps less so, to question it. All too often, I had the impression that a scholar was more interested to relate a particular event or topic to some meta-interpretation grounded in criticism or an academic debate. It is unfair to cite any one example, but Quentin Stevens’s article on “The German ‘City Beach’” comes to hand (Transforming Urban Waterfronts), with its references to the Post-Fordist production of the urban landscape. Based on information from websites, Stevens’s article contains much useful information, but misses the electoral dynamics and historical controversy over the autoroute along the Seine quayside, a UNESCO world heritage site, which made the Paris-Plage such a success, leading the way for others, and fails to draw attention to beach-making along the coast of Picardy, Schleswig-Holstein, or Mecklenberg-Vorpommern, which in many ways created the modern paradigm in Northern Europe but on equally artificial, investment-oriented terms. This article—again, it is typical in some respects—assumes that the reader knows what is meant by the neoliberal economy, and would share the author’s view that it is a way of rationalizing opportunities for private investment and profit. The neoliberal economists however did not invent capitalism, nor have they perfected it. Neoliberal economics is not nearly as powerful as it is thought to be: it has encountered some significant barriers in ports in the form of entrenched corporate dock labor practices, the persistence of organized crime that has grown together with the volume of trade, nontariff barriers to trade, and the imposition of extraterritorial, antiterrorist security measures. The benefits of the neoliberal approach, when applied to ports, can stand on their own: regulatory reforms would lift productivity; international trade grows faster than domestic economies; countries that adopt innovations more easily also grow faster. One suspects that at times labels are excuses for hard, critical thinking.
Periodization is not as cut and dried as so many of the authors in these collective volumes would have it. It is too easy to take as a given that the 1990s ushered in an era of globalization that marks a break with the past. Port cities struggle to cope with containerization, which clearly has transformed the spatial links between manufacturing and trade and distribution, chains of supply and retailing. Yes, the scale of global trade and of port facilities adapted to it is dramatically greater since the 1990s, but does this represent such a complete break with the past extending back to the introduction of steam-powered ships with electric winches and steel hulls? I for one would suggest backdating the transformative process to the late nineteenth century, and argue that there is an extended era of globalization and its specific maritime character that urban historians can study in port cities, marked by the rise, fall, and sometimes recovery of specific urban nodes (New York and Yokohama being prime examples of a cyclical pattern), by the decline of some (London) and the rise of others (Los Angeles). In fact, the books under review cover more of the nineteenth century, but unsystematically, than the focus on globalization today would lead one to expect. And I would give far more importance to the erosion of the urban bourgeoisie in many key port cities as a result of the expansion of state power and the massive increase in the cost of harbor improvements in the years immediately preceding and following World War I, and to the survival of a mercantile capitalism in shipping syndicates, whether based in Hong Kong or Taiwan, or in London and Athens, Hamburg, or Copenhagen.
So we know, at the end, much more about what port cities are, why they are important, and how they differ from other types of cities, but not enough. Given the scale of the global economy and the growing dependence on air and rail travel—who takes ships any more but for cruises?—why are the gateways around Charles de Gaulle and Schiphol airports today not comparable with London’s East End or the Amsterdam docks of the past? I hope that the many scholars at work on port cities—especially in the contemporary period—would reflect further on the enormous significance for any country to open itself to the sea, and on the difference between competition between port cities and between land-locked cities. Each of the collective works under review sets out a different paradigm or hypothesis, but adding them together does not make for a comprehensive, unifying conceptual framework.
Positively, there is no one overarching paradigm for the study of port cities. Yet surely there is some reason why so many scholars are interested in port cities, precisely now. Has it to do with the relative exhaustion of other, more traditional topics, in other, more familiar, continental cities? With the growth of global history and of interest in Asia? Perhaps; but equally, and put forward simply as speculation, perhaps port cities—their unusual social complexity, their dual character as ports connected to other ports and as cities embedded on the land, their hinterlands sometimes far away and sometimes on their backdoor—speak to a postmodernist mood that rejects homogeneity and tries to bring out underlying tensions. And if this is the case, then I can explain to the reader why I find the social science approach to historical scholarship (in which I too was trained, but at a time when the alternative was an empiricist tradition skeptical of structural explanations) unsatisfying, incomplete. Hypotheses are tested, but not against counterhypotheses. Contextualization trumps narration, and intersubjectivity transcends objectivity; postmodernism assumes that tension and conflict are the way of the world in which everything is contested, consciousness is embedded and constructed, and people are manipulated; activists are on the good side and property developers on the bad, being exploited is more worthy than to dominate. There is an incipient moralizing tone that is difficult to shake. Fernand Braudel’s magisterial The Mediterranean, and the series of largely European studies of Mediterranean port city elites, trade patterns, cultural exchanges, and political conflicts inspired by it, show that Renaissance and early modern Venice, Seville, Genoa, Naples, Marseille, and Istanbul can be treated comprehensively on their own and as part of a networked civilization. Would that these examples of books which represent years of study inspire scholars again. But that is a different model than the collective volume based on a dozen or more contributions by scholars trying to find a common ground for an interest in a subject.
From my own experience, the challenge of waterfront transformation and port city modernization is more complicated politically, and to an extent that is not reflected in the scholarship, it is driven by the owners and operators of major fleets and other actors in the shipping world, admittedly an opaque universe. My contact with policy and politics since the 1980s would suggest a more highly nuanced picture: of the tension between the interests of port cities from the point of view of the shipping industry and that of nation-states, looking at infrastructure investment in relation to debt, trade policy, structural change and local and regional electoral dynamics; of politicians looking for solutions to complex problems that align with many constituencies; of experts asking for best-practice examples for problems for which experimental solutions are needed; of changing moods and preferences in the electorate. It is very difficult to elaborate a strategy which public and private sector leaders can embrace, enabling them to take initiative. The view in the rear-view mirror can narrow the vision, making it difficult to see what options people thought they had. The frequent use of words and references common in contemporary criticism do not make the stories and insights grounded in the study of contemporary urban development accessible to planners, decision makers, transport engineers, environmental regulators, property developers, and civic foundations. We will have port cities with us for the foreseeable future; their development will continue to pose significant civic and political challenges, not least because many port cities are exposed to natural catastrophes and climate change. Ironically, several articles in these books are about conflicts over better outcomes, but themselves are unlikely to contribute to a larger public debate.
This is admittedly an outsider’s view of recent scholarship. Written during the Crisis that began in 2008, after most of the books under review were completed, this essay tries to draw a line between the recent past and the future, emphasizing the need for a fresh perspective. In no particular order of importance, my recommendations are first, to provide an empirical record that is not truncated by the demands of a methodology or a conceptual framework; second, to put the story of any port and certainly of systems and networks of port cities in a historical and comparative perspective equal to the subject, regionally and globally; third, to provide more leads for others to follow; and fourth, to carry out more oral histories of contemporary events for which the actors and eyewitnesses are still alive, an objective I would particularly emphasize. Historians should do more to influence decisions about what documents to retain, how to handle electronic communications in archives, etc. Interdisciplinary studies should include the burgeoning fields of memory studies and of communications, and more serious and less impressionistic efforts to engage with environmental policy, energy policy, and economic history, including finance, trade policy, currency exchange, development economics, and property investment. Put another way: the transformation and roles of port cities will be a most important way to understand the urban civilization of our age. A sound methodology and ambitious research agenda should be within the collective means of scholars working across national borders and subfields. The books under review underscore how important and ambitious this agenda for global urban history is. Let’s take it to the next step.