ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the existing scholarship concerned with port cities and how this expanding field relates to more established research areas, in particular urban and migration history. It makes the case for an actor-centered approach, which includes a broad set of human and non-human agents, and emphasizes the need to twin the histories of migrations and the history of port cities. Migrants made vital contributions to the construction of the urban-maritime world and port cities, in turn, formed the lives of these mobile people. The introduction also reflects on how three main factors—technology, government capacity, and the built environment—conditioned people on the move and the port cities they encountered. By examining the constellation of these factors and by covering a wide geographical and chronological range, the several chapters provide new insights into both local developments and the generic features of urban globalized society. Throughout the ages of sail and steam, port cities served as nodes for long-distance transmission and exchange. Commodities and news dispatches; people, animals, seeds, bacteria, and viruses; technological and scientific knowledge; as well as new ideas, fashions, and other cultural trends all moved through and transformed these microcosms of the global. Places like Manila, New York City, Izmir, Antwerp, and Barcelona functioned as focal points and catalysts for larger colonial projects, wars, mercantile ventures, and (mass) migrations. This volume explores the mutually transformative relations between migrants and port cities. Migrants made vital contributions to the construction of the urban-maritime world in terms of the built environment, the particular sociocultural milieu, and contemporary representations of these spaces. And port cities formed and conditioned the lives of these mobile people, be they seafarers, traders, passers-through, or people in search of a new home. The volume’s contributions emphasize the agency of migrants when establishing themselves in or navigating through port cities, while also recognizing that waterfront spaces were no mere scenery but could in fact expand or limit migrants’ opportunities.
