Hafenstädte: Mobilität, Migration, Globalisierung

Port Cities in Global Perspective: An Introduction

This volume examines the phenomena of mobility and migration in port cities at the height of the steamship era, ca. 1860-1930. The inherent contradiction that ports were the source of a city’s (or a country’s or an Empire’s) esteem in the world on the one hand and that on the other, the ports’ unwanted and uncontrollable processes prompted negative reactions, is the common thread of all articles. Our approach to the study of port cities focuses on the contact in ports between people of different origin. This contact situation has the potential to put into question one’s concept of the city, the nation, the religious community, civilization, or even time. By consequence, it can threaten existing power structures and has the capacity to alter or reaffirm urban and national identities.

The Seaside Resident – A Citizen of the World? On Port City Societies and Cosmopolitanism

The article investigates the acclaimed social openness of port cities, subsumed under the label of cosmopolitanism. It argues that in the study of maritime urban diversity from a historical perspective, it is important to consider diversity not only as object of scrutiny, but also as part of the approach. When studying cosmopolitanism, one should aim to integrate all of the four common definitions: a) publicly visible diversity, b) an ability of individual or collective agents to navigate between differently coded spheres, c) an active practice of sociabilities that cross community borders, and d) a belief and a policy of enhancing cohesion without a monolithic base. When tracing the failures of cosmopolitanism, one must consider that the violent communalist or nationalist activism manifesting itself in port cities is not simply the intrusion of an antagonistic outside world, but rather the flipside of maritime urbanity, as both ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism thrive under the same conditions.

Port Cities, Migration, and Control, 1890–1930

Port cities were gateways of globalization and nodes of mobility, particularly in the late 19th century. Several million migrants crossed ports like Hamburg on their way into the New World, contributing substantially to the rise of several shipping companies. Due to fears of migration and hygienic conceptions, port city councils enacted a strict regime of control, keeping certain ethnic groups like Eastern Jews and Chinese migrants under intense scrutiny. The article sketches and compares some cases of maritime migration control in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Shipping and port cities, connecting the world, could be targeted as a threat of potential invasion in the western hemisphere.

European Seamen as a Problem of Colonial Identity and Order in Calcutta of the 1860s

The relationship between the wealthier part of British India’s white society and the infamous seaman ‘Jack Tar’ was ambiguous. In the eyes of the colonial administration the seamen’s alleged lack of discipline and ‘reckless and irrational ways’ brought them close to the ‘uncivilised natives’. This was a fact regarded as highly disturbing in a colonial setting based on the ideology of racial difference and — at least partly — informed by notions of a civilising mission supposedly entrusted to the British by providence. The problems arising from their presence in Indian seaport towns could not be easily solved by the ‘politics of making invisible’, as their labour was vital to the empire. Their position was therefore a highly ambivalent one, vacillating between inclusion and exclusion into the fold of ‘respectable’ white colonial society. In certain contexts and situations they were certainly seen as being part of the imperial establishment — though on the lowest ranks of the order of precedence — whereas in other constellations they were perceived as outright threat to this very establishment and hence subjected to processes of discursive ‘othering’ and practical disciplining.

Open Ports, Closed-off Society: On the Public Image of the Chinese in Japan at the Time of the Treaty Port System, 1859–1899

After the abolishment of the Japanese treaty port system in 1899, foreigners were free to take up residence in the interior of the country. However, restrictions regarding certain occupations were introduced. As a result, most Chinese remained confined to the settlements, while Europeans and Americans were free to leave. This unequal treatment was preceded by an increasingly unfavourable perception of the Chinese in Japanese society. The article traces back the reasons for this negative attitude to the 1870s, taking into account the social history of Chinese immigration to Japan and the legal framework for foreign residents as well as the general background of Sino-Japanese relations at the end of the 19th century.

Commercial Center and Pilgrims’ Thoroughfare: Jeddah in the Late Ottoman Period

This article discusses changing notions of „foreignness“ in nineteenth century Jeddah. This was a town where traders of the Red Sea and adjacent oceans, as well as pilgrims en route to Mecca met, and often settled. The article argues that Jeddah was a cosmopolitan city in the sense that it allowed, for most of the century, for these different groups to co-exist peacefully. In the course of the nineteenth century, legal as well as political and economic conditions changed and, arguably, increasingly regulated and complicated this co-existence. The article describes on the basis of a number of examples how ethnic, political and sectarian identities were constructed and changed over time. Arguably, this impacted most dramatically on those Muslims stemming from regions which had come under European protection. Earlier considered predominantly as co-religionists, they now came to be regarded as potential European agents in the age of imperialism. The influx, notably, of Indian Muslim traders added an economic dimension as British protection afforded them advantages in a changing international trade system. Another group whose presence increased, but was regarded with high suspicion were Christians of various nationalities. The Jeddah uprising of 1858 can be interpreted as the most prominent expression of these tensions.

Port City and National Founding Myth: On the Meaning of Buenos Aires as an Element of the Argentinean National Discourse, 19th to 21st Century

The article deals with the symbolic function of the port city of Buenos Aires within the 19th century discourse of the Argentine nation. The city was a gateway for millions of European immigrants who entered Argentina in the second half of the 19th century. According to Argentine intellectuals like Alberdi or Sarmiento, Buenos Aires was the cradle of “civilization” and “progress”, thus representing an important element of the national project of a “white” and “European” Argentina. In contrast, the much older history of immigration of Non-European groups to the port city was excluded from these imaginations. The text shows these mechanisms, taking as an example the history of the African immigration to Buenos Aires from colonial times to the 20th century.

Sansibar: An East African Port City and its Times during the 19th and 20th Century

In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Zanzibar has gone through multiple changes, not only regarding its position as a hub of East African coastal and transoceanic trade and economy, but also in terms of political and religious change. These processes of change have found expression in the emergence of a distinct „timescape“ (Zeitlandschaft) of several co-existing and/or competing orders of time, such as „religious times“ or „clock time“, which were again of central importance for the management of the harbour of Zanzibar. This contribution looks at the way in which these different times have been negotiated in Zanzibar´s recent history, from the 1830s to the present.

On the basis of two professorial dissertations, two dissertations and an assignment on the legal methodology of European law, the article shows the breakup, overlap and penetration of hitherto existing – maybe only allegedly closed – structures of the national state and in particular of its constitution by European and International Public Law. Thereby the author traces the development directions, which appear to initiate a constitutionalisation of the Community‘s sphere of law, and in fact have been retarded by the failure of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, but not have been held up. At the same time it is discussed, which classifications of the jurisdictions on the different levels this proceeding constitutionalisation conditions.