Imagining the future of ports in the long nineteenth century

CALL FOR PAPERS
SPECIAL ISSUE: “IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF PORTS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY”
Guest editors: Giovanni Cristina (giovanni.cristina@uniroma3.it), University of Roma Tre, and Giovanni Favero (gfavero@unive.it), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Abstract deadline: 31 May 2025
The nineteenth century, as stated by the volumes that have now become classics of historiography by Christopher A. Bayly (2003) and Jürgen Osterhammel (2009), coincides with a «transformation of the world» in a global sense and «the birth of the modern world». That century, considered here in a long chronology reaching up to World War I, represents in fact a discontinuity in which the new technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions changed maritime exchanges (from cabotage to steam navigation), whilst new infrastructures – artificial ports, railways, canals, etc. – offered many port cities around the world new opportunities to revive their position in the globalised circuit of exchanges, redefining urban hierarchies and functions at various levels. The transition from the «age of natural ports» to that of «artificial ports» (Brògueira Dias and Fernandes Alves, 2010) affects, with varying degrees of intensity, many urban contexts globally: from the most famous cases of Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Shanghai, London, Liverpool, Marseille, Trieste, Barcelona, Genoa, Yokohama, Hamburg, Rotterdam, etc., to the “minor” ones of Rijeka, Valencia, Catania, Izmir, Thessaloniki, Mersin, Beirut and many others (Özveren et al., 2023; Miller, 2012; Hein, 2016). Obviously, the chronology and the characteristics of these transformations can be variable, depending on the peculiarities of the local contexts and their relationships with the global evolution of maritime transportation. Sometimes new technologies applied to means of transportation and global market dynamics select ports to be included or excluded in maritime traffic circuits. Sometimes, it is instead new urban hierarchies and new port geographies that redefine trade networks and forms of mobility of people and goods. In
this perspective, the “permanent adjustment process” that ports underwent during the 19th century has been classified into four possible categories: disruptive innovation, spatial adaptation, selective adaptation and one-way adaptation (Marnot, 2024). What historians are still missing is an understanding of the -strategic or emerging- decision-making process that determined one choice or the other, as connected with the future perspectives envisaged by the different actors and communities (Tinning, 2024) involved in port-city projects and planning. How did they imagine the future of the port, of its city and of the related hinterland? And how did their choices impact, expectedly and unexpectedly, on their actual evolution?
The present proposal aims to collect articles that analyse the perception and response to changes in maritime transport at the harbour level, with respect to port cities considered both as individual cases and as groups of cities belonging to a regional geographic area or connected in a network, and finally as case studies in a comparative perspective.
In particular, contributions should address the following issues:
– The gap between development expectations and actual reality in various harbour contexts. Indeed, on the one hand, there are the rhetorics (economic, geopolitical, scientific, literary, iconographic, etc.) through which port communities think of themselves, represent themselves, and perceive themselves in relation to technological advances and the potential development opportunities they offer (e.g., entry into new circuits of global trade, expansion of trade, revolutionising urban hierarchies and the division between centres and peripheries, etc.). On the other, the reality that then actually occurs, when the saving effects of a specific technology or infrastructure vanish for various reasons (failure to build, persistence of backward factors, etc.).
– The relationships between decision-making centres (political, economic) and individual port cities. In a century in which new nation-states arise (think Italy or Germany), multinational Empires change, and new colonial Empires emerge, what is the degree of autonomy of port cities with respect to the political entities to which they belong? What kind of dialectics are created between the infrastructure and port policies of individual states and the aspirations of cities? Do government choices on infrastructure investment and location create expectations and illusions?
– Rivalries among ports competing in the logic of global trade. If in the first half of the century technological development was conceived as a factor of universal progress, capable of bringing benefits to all humanity, and commercial spaces as “reticular” systems among equals (as in Michel Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée, 1832), with the second half of the 19th century feelings of aggressive competition increased, which would later result in Imperialism and the «Scramble for Africa». How was this transition between the different meanings of development offered by the new technologies (from universal progress to the will to power) represented and perceived by cities and the communities inhabiting them?
– Port cities and their hinterland. Harbours are gateways connecting a hinterland to the world. In the context of changing technological and logistic conditions for maritime transport, reimagining the future of port cities implies the mobilisation and redefinition of the internal area using the port as a hub for shopping and mobility. Such a redefinition affected both the geographical extension of the hinterland and its economic, cultural and political identity, as shown for Chicago and the Great West (Cronon, 1991). How were changes in the port functions connected to the imagined and realised reconfiguration of the economic and political geography of the mainland?
– Ports and infrastructures as factors of mobility. The intensification of maritime connections on a global scale, favoured by steam navigation, generated new forms of mobility for goods (see Fumian, 2024, on wheat), and transcontinental migratory flows. In these processes, the infrastructures themselves are both a factor in attracting migratory flows towards the most successful port cities (Lawton-Lee, 2002), and the vector of forms of mobility that would otherwise be impossible. The case of the Suez Canal is particularly significant both as a generator of new urban-port centres, such as Port Said (Carminati, 2023), and as a means for new transcontinental mobility (Huber, 2013). Shipping companies also play a similar role, “selecting” their itineraries through negotiations with the local ruling authorities of the ports they call at. How is the intrinsic nature of infrastructures as “vectors of mobility” perceived by the individual and collective actors that promote the construction of ports, railways and canals? How are these new and more intense forms of mobility linked to migration and to tourism managed by urban authorities?
The Special Issue will be guest edited by Giovanni Cristina (giovanni.cristina@uniroma3.it), University of Roma Tre, and Giovanni Favero (gfavero@unive.it), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, who will select (with JTH´s editorship) papers based on their thematic fit, originality and scholarly rigor.
Abstract deadline: 31 May 2025
Abstract components: Your abstract should include the following items:
1.
Name, affiliation, and email address
2.
Short biography (150 words)
3.
Abstract of 500 words including article title, exposition of case study/research question/outline, relevant theme addressed, and article type
Please send the above components in ONE collated pdf document to Giovanni Cristina (giovanni.cristina@uniroma3.it), University of Roma Tre, and Giovanni Favero (gfavero@unive.it), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
The authors of selected papers will be notified approximately four weeks after the deadline. The deadline for the submission of full articles will be 31 October 2025.
Papers will be subject to a double-anonymised review process. About JTH, its indexing and metrics and submissions guideline refer to https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jth.
Queries before the abstract submission date can be directed to guest editors.
References:
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Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Malden-Oxford-Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
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Emílio Brògueira Dias and Jorge Fernandes Alves, “Ports, policies and interventions in ports in Portugal – 20th Century” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 80 (2010), 41-64.
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Lucia Carminati, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said : Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023).
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Michel Chevalier, Système de la Méditerranée (Paris : Fayard, 2006) [Paris, 1832].
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William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York-London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1991).
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Carlo Fumian, Pane quotidiano. L’invisibile mercato mondiale del grano tra XIX e XX secolo (Rome: Donzelli, 2024).
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Carola Hein, “Port Cities”, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 809–827.
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Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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Richard Lawton and Robert Lee (eds.), Population and Society in Western European Port-Cities, c. 1650–1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002).
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Bruno Marnot, “The permanent adjustment process: A theoretical approach to structural change in commercial ports from the nineteenth century onwards” The Journal of Transport History, https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241295482
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Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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Jürgen Osterhammel, The transformation of the world: a global history of the nineteenth century (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014) [München: Beck, 2009].
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Eyüp Özveren, Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu and Tülin Selvi Ünlü (eds.), Mediterranean Port Cities: Connectivity in Modern Times (Cham: Springer, 2023).
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Morten Tinning, “Imagined futures of sail and stea: The role of community in envisioning entrepreneurial ventures” Business History 66.2 (2024), 386-406.