The Transformation of the World (62 page)

Most written history has treated port cities rather shabbily.
¹³⁴
They are by definition on the periphery, far from inland centers, their populations turbulent and uncontrollable, cosmopolitan and therefore suspect for upholders of cultural, religious, and national orthodoxies. Even the Hansa remained on the fringes of the newly emerging German national context. Hamburg became part of the German customs area only in 1883, having previously been treated for such purposes as a foreign territory cut off from its natural hinterland. Scarcely ever have port cities housed important sanctuaries or places of top scholarship. Major temples, churches, and shrines, as well as leading universities and academies, have usually been located inland. All this applies as much to Europe as it does to North Africa and the whole of Asia.

A Special World

In the nineteenth century, two general trends enhanced the role of port cities and changed their character: the growing differentiation of maritime activity, and the replacement of wooden ships with metal ones.

With the growth of overseas trade and naval power, shipping involved an ever more intricate mosaic of activities. Functions that had been united in large overseas companies (e.g., the East India Company) now became separate from one another, most particularly the civilian and military sides of sea travel. In the eighteenth century, naval warfare required special facilities under the exclusive control of state apparatuses. Ports such as those at Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Chatham in England, or Brest and Toulon in France, or Kronstadt in Russia now acquired great significance as bases and shipyards for huge war fleets. German examples followed later: Wilhelmshaven was founded in 1856 as the military port of Prussia. In the nineteenth century, such naval bases spread around the world. The British Empire maintained large military shipyards in Malta (which became even more important after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869), Bermuda, and Singapore.
¹³⁵
The rise of the steamship at first necessitated more frequent
shore stops and therefore gave birth to a new kind of port: the coaling station. Many of the seemingly absurd imperial disputes of the nineteenth century—in the Pacific, for example—become understandable once one realizes that the main issue was the supply of coal to warships.
¹³⁶

Similar to the military-civilian cleavage was the one that opened between freight and passenger transport, as one can see from the growing complexity of harbor layouts. The processing of passengers took place as close as possible to the city center, whereas the railroad made it possible to load and unload freight in more out-of-the-way areas. Marseille offers a good example of this bifurcation of port space. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, its Vieux Port—which had scarcely changed since Roman times—was superseded by a Port Moderne not far away. The old ports had been closely integrated into the life of the city, and mighty ships had similarly dominated the interior of cities such as Boston and Liverpool. The new-style ports became self-enclosed organisms with their own administration, conceived as a technical whole and both spatially and mentally remote from the city.
¹³⁷
The first separate “docklands” emerged in London, Hull, and Liverpool. The model for the modernization of Marseille was the West India Docks in London, whose construction had begun in 1799, but new installations were added to the English port throughout the nineteenth century to handle the increase in tonnage. The total volume of shipping entering London from abroad rose almost thirteenfold between 1820 and 1901, from 778,000 to 10 million tons, while the largest ships were ten times larger than before.
¹³⁸
Unlike the open quays on the Thames that they replaced, the West India Docks were a closely guarded space enclosed by a wall eight meters high; they were like deep artificial lakes, surrounded by towers and fortifications reminiscent of the Middle Ages. At the very moment when external city walls were coming down all over Europe, the new port enclosures were reaching skyward. The activities inside them were based on an increasing division of labor. The London docks were regarded as a miracle of engineering, and Karl Baedeker's famous tourist guide spoke of them as a sight not to be missed.
¹³⁹

The modern port in Marseille, the second-largest city of nineteenth-century France, was meant to surpass even its London model. Very large ships were able to enter the docks, whose construction had been considerably simplified by the use of concrete, and it was possible to anchor quite close to the warehouses. Iron and steel technology produced ever stronger steam-driven and hydraulic cranes. The pressure to modernize compelled ports all over Europe to follow the lead of Marseille and London, and the middle of the century marked the greatest turning point in port history since the Middle Ages. In Hamburg the old natural harbor gave way in 1866 to newly built installations,
¹⁴⁰
and here, as in many other cities, there was resettlement on a large scale.

The innovations spread to Asia. After much wrangling over finance, Bombay—which had profited from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869—obtained an up-to-date port in 1875. In Japan the city council of Osaka, with no help from
the government in Tokyo, put up the money for a very expensive harbor, the largest urban construction project in the country in the late nineteenth century. In Batavia it was only in 1886 that it became possible for ships to load and unload directly at the quayside—too late for the old colonial capital to keep its lead over the rising port of Surabaya. The year 1888, when the first modern quay facility opened in Hong Kong, may be thought of as the beginning of port modernization in China.
¹⁴¹
But the process crept only slowly along the Chinese coast, since the surplus of ultracheap labor was a barrier to mechanization. What need was there for cranes if porters could be hired for next to nothing?

The new ports formed a special world of mass freight, hard manual labor, and a little mechanization, increasingly separate from the areas where upper-class passengers and herds of migrants boarded ship. The ocean liner finally disappeared in the 1950s, while at the same time container ports and petroleum depots were located far out on river estuaries. The “modern” ports of the nineteenth century gradually fell silent—demolished, filled in, and used for skyscraper development.

In the nineteenth century, inadequate port facilities sometimes proved a serious hindrance to the blossoming of trade. In Buenos Aires, which lacked a serviceable natural harbor, ocean steamers continued through the 1880s to anchor out at sea, loading and unloading by means of barges. Then the wing of the Argentine oligarchy that was prepared to shoulder the cost of a modern port won the day. In 1898 the project on the River Plate reached completion, providing the city with nine kilometers of cement quays, deep sea basins, and modern loading equipment.
¹⁴²
In Cape Town only the South African War triggered such modernization; it was financially and technically the most formidable task the municipality had ever taken on.
¹⁴³

The Iron Ship and the Iron Horse

The switch from timber to metal hulls, and the related, though slightly later, transition from sailing ships to fuel-powered vessels, was the second major new trend. It became generally visible around 1870 and reached a conclusion around 1890. The consequences were higher transport capacities, lower freight and passenger charges, greater speeds, less dependence on the weather, and the possibility of keeping to regular schedules. Speed was not just a question of journey time. Steamers did not have to spend as long as sailing ships waiting at a port. The pace of life and work in the docks therefore accelerated dramatically.

A further result of the advent of steamships was that the barriers between sea and river transport were partly overcome. It is difficult to travel upriver on a sailing ship, but gunboats or small trading vessels have no trouble moving on engine power into previously inaccessible areas. China was “opened up” twice: once on paper, by the so-called unequal treaties that began in 1842, and once by the arrival of steamships, after 1860. Decades before railroads penetrated the Chinese interior, Western and Chinese steamships were already getting the process under
way. Between 1863 and 1901 it became possible for ocean steamers of any size to reach Hankou (today's Wuhan), the great city right in the middle of China, when the waters of the Yangtze were high. Only after the turn of the century did major port improvements make Shanghai a final destination that could beat any competition for the ocean giants. From then on, it would be the transshipment point for goods to and from Hankou.
¹⁴⁴

The building of railways also had a great influence on the functioning of port cities, as we may see again from the example of East and Southeast Asia. It is true that some optimally located ports—above all, Hong Kong and Singapore—could function for a long time without an effective rail link to the interior. But in this they were exceptions. The general rule, valid on all continents, was that port cities without an adequate rail link had no future. The great port cities of the modern age are points at which land and water transport meet up and interact with each other.

Many, though not all, of these great ports were centers of shipbuilding. Often—in Barcelona and Bergen, for instance—this was the first industry they developed: one of the hardest and technologically most demanding branches of the engineering industry, especially at a time when ships' hulls were riveted and could not yet be welded. In China industrialization began—before any cotton factories—with the big shipyards in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Fuzhou, which at first were all under state control. But the Chinese government was not alone in grasping the importance of shipbuilding for national development, both economic and military. Some port cities, such as Glasgow and Kiel, had greater importance in shipbuilding than in overseas trade. After 1850 Glasgow successfully switched from cotton spinning—which was then in decline—to the building of ships and machines; at their height, in the 1880s and 1890s, its yards were the most productive in the world.
¹⁴⁵

Port Societies

For social historians the most important aspect of port cities, especially those undergoing industrialization, is the diversity and flexibility of their labor markets. There was a need for sailors and transport hands, for skilled shipyard workers and unskilled labor in local light industry, and for captains, officers, pilots, and port engineers. Services of all kinds were in demand and in supply—from trade finance to red-light districts. One might go so far as to define a port city not by its geographical location but by the peculiarities of its job structure.
¹⁴⁶
What crucially distinguished a port city from an inland city was the importance of short-term employment in its economy; laborers were hired from one day to the next, and there were a large number of people looking for work. The labor force in port cities was almost entirely male, whereas in light industry during the early period of industrialization the female share might be as high as three-quarters. Dockworkers in Europe were far down in the jobs hierarchy, whereas in early twentieth-century China they were leading figures in anti-imperialist
strikes or boycotts and usually belonged to the political vanguard. In Europe they were paid badly and treated harshly and were rarely more than casual laborers; even when day wages receded in other areas of employment, they remained the dominant form in the docks. Besides, the mechanization of transport labor reduced demand for the mass of workers. Sharp seasonal fluctuations in employment often meant that women and children had to pitch in to augment family income. Children did not work in the docks, but dock labor indirectly brought child labor in its train.
¹⁴⁷

The unstable, fluctuating character of the population of port cities was not a nineteenth-century novelty; earlier, too, they had been magnets for commercial diasporas Nor should they be seen simply as conglomerations of foreigners. People who migrated there from the hinterland were strangers only to a lesser degree. In Chinese port cities, for example, they often lived alongside others in the same line of business, constituting distinctive social milieux, guild organizations, and recruitment networks. Shanghai, in particular, was a patchwork quilt of such communities based on a solidarity of origin. Attempts in the early twentieth century to organize a harbor proletariat into unions and political parties had to contend with such particularism.
¹⁴⁸

Groups based on place of origin were not peculiar to Asian cities. The transcontinental networking of port cities invariably tended to produce a differentiated ethnic structure. In Trieste, for instance, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Serbs lived alongside one another; Odessa grew after 1805 through the targeted recruitment of Jews, Swiss, Germans, Greeks, and others.
¹⁴⁹
Following the Great Famine, Irish workers emigrated to British port cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow, and Cardiff, living there in tightly knit and fairly closed communities. In 1851, Irish people constituted more than one-fifth of the population of Liverpool, but the relative lack of segregation seen in Hamburg was not reproduced there. Immigrants often had the worst housing, and their children had the lowest chances of climbing the social ladder.

Security forces of every kind view port cities as breeding grounds for crime and civil commotion—a reputation that was borne out in the twentieth century even more than in the nineteenth. In Germany the revolution of 1918 started with a naval mutiny; in Russia, sailors rose up in 1921 against a revolution that had betrayed its principles. Dockworkers stood in the forefront of the struggle against colonialism and foreign interests, whether in China (Hong Kong and Canton), India (Madras), Vietnam (Haiphong), or Kenya (Mombasa). Port cities were and are more open than inland cities, not only to people from abroad but also to foreign ideas. In Germany, Prussian authoritarianism was counterbalanced by the bourgeois liberalism of Hanseatic ports such as Hamburg and Bremen. Similar oppositions may be found elsewhere in the world; port cities have tended to be places of deviance and innovation. The state was represented by people it seldom needed in other parts of the country: customs officials. Piracy and naval warfare were sources of vulnerability, and special courts administered
a special law of the sea. Ever since the era of Elizabethan corsairs, the British Empire had been aware of how much “naval pressure” could be exercised through the blockading and bombardment of port cities. One celebrated episode was the Royal Navy's destruction of the old town of Copenhagen in 1807, an unprovoked attack on a neutral country that severely damaged Britain's reputation in continental Europe. In 1815 the United States declared war on the “pirate nest” of Algiers, for which no one in Europe had any sympathy, and fought successful naval actions against Algerian frigates.
¹⁵⁰
In 1863, out of revenge for the murder of a merchant, British warships destroyed large parts of the Japanese fortified city of Kagoshima.
¹⁵¹