It is not hard to see why port cities remain a vogue subject of global history. To mind, come images of bustling wharfs, ships moving in and out of expanding harbours and the circulation and cosmopolitan mingling of people from far-flung places. As crucial sites of connection and transition, they can easily be construed as bridgeheads of the global and laboratories of the modern. In studying port cities primarily through the lens of connectivity and as conduits of flows, global historians have built on approaches pioneered by oceanic historians, and in particular the interdisciplinary work of Fernand Braudel. The French historian of the Annales School privileged the long-term rhythms of material life and structural features defining a wider region such as trading and sailing routes over historical events on the human scale. Braudel’s concern with ‘geographic time’ opened up new vistas and demonstrated the pivotal role of climate and the environment as factors shaping history, a concern that is, albeit in a different way, at the heart of this special issue. However, the growth trajectories of individual port cities appear on this Braudelian canvas as mostly anecdotal. Port cities mattered in history to the extent that they were nodes, or ‘human hives’ as Braudel liked to call them, supporting and sustaining an ocean-spanning or transregional network.Footnote ¹ In this structuralist reading, the environment is a fixed variable steering the course of history, not an unstable, localized factor explaining urban contingency and the singularity of urban experience.

Braudel’s The Mediterranean marked a paradigm shift in the study of ocean spaces, but its impact reverberated across the historical discipline.Footnote ² By the late 1980s, a new generation of historians working on the intersection of urban and maritime history emphasized the importance of studying ports as an urban typology in its own right. In Brides of the Sea, a lavishly illustrated volume edited by Frank Broeze, the authors implored historians to ‘put ports back into port cities’ as a physical place in the urban fabric.Footnote ³ Yet, although the volume has acquired a reputation as a landmark study among specialists working on port cities, a more recent wave of scholarship inspired by global history agendas has continued to treat port cities primarily as stages for the unfolding of world history.Footnote ⁴ As Lasse Heerten noted in a recent survey of the field, there is still ‘very little interest in the urban space in which ports were embedded’.Footnote ⁵ In seminal tomes aiming for planetary coverage such as The Transformation of the World, A World Connecting and The Birth of the Modern World, port cities typically feature as bridgeheads of uneven and accelerated globalization, but are rarely studied as sites of momentous economic, social and environmental transformation in their own right, where the global was ‘made’, reconfigured and contested.Footnote ⁶ In a similar fashion, John Darwin has recently explored the role of port cities as drivers of globalization in his book Unlocking the World. Footnote ⁷ This emphasis on the role of port cities in all sorts of globe-spanning networks has shed light on important commonalities between modern port cities in different world regions, but tends to gloss over local factors and path dependencies that can help explain the rise of the port in the first place. This functionalist approach also risks reproducing older tropes of homogenization and placelessness that pervade the ‘Global Cities’ literature pioneered by sociologists such as Saskia Sassen.Footnote ⁸ While there may be some truth to this phenomenon in both the twenty-first century and shortly before, global history persists with this tendency to elide differentiation while simultaneously extrapolating and applying typologies and concepts that derive from the Global North across world regions.

This special issue proposes a more ‘anchored’ perspective to complement the sea-directed, roving gaze of global historians.Footnote ⁹ As our different case-studies reveal, port cities were not merely portals of globalization, but incubators of change in their own right. Their growth trajectories, we argue, can only be meaningfully explained with reference to the constant dynamic interplay between local environmental and social factors on the one hand, and wider entanglements on the other. Port cityscapes, our contributors observe time and again, were never stable and much more attention needs to be paid to the precarious and fugitive nature of the urban in relation to natural landscapes. By foregrounding the crucial enabling and constraining role of internal ecologies in shaping and steering port city histories, we explore the potential for a global urban history that is less concerned with connections and more focused on synchronicities of processes and outcomes. Capitalism, imperialism and migration dramatically altered the socio-spatial fabric of port cities in the Global South, both mirroring and generating global asymmetries. Yet, in spite of important structural and functional similarities, cities such as Beirut, Colombo, Lagos and Havana are rarely studied together, thus reinforcing narratives of exceptionalism. Bringing together leading specialists of port cities in different world regions, our special issue probes what a closer look at their socio-environmental commonalities and differences can contribute to global history at large.

The interplay between water and processes of urbanization is a prominent theme taken up in this special issue. Although a water link to the wider world is a necessary condition for any port city (at least before the airport), the interaction between water and city space is rarely studied.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, global histories are awash with liquid metaphors of ‘flows’ and ‘circulations’ and yet the role of water in shaping urban environments, and port cities in particular, is very often ignored. This observation brings us to a broader point about the artificial distinction, reinforced by academic habits of disciplinary specialization, between built and natural landscapes, and a division between the human and natural that continues to run, although challenged by environmental historians, across the social sciences. As the pioneering environmental historian William Cronon wrote in 1996, ‘our project must be to locate a nature which is within rather than without history, for only by so doing can we find human communities which are inside rather than outside nature’.Footnote ¹¹ Taking this call for a more holistic understanding of place seriously, this special issue prompts us to think of port cities not as abstract conduits of global flows, but as constantly changing places embedded in, and often existing in an unstable relationship with, natural landscapes. We deliberately opted for a broad and loose notion of environment that captures both built and natural landscapes and their transformations over time. Our focus, thus, is not the production of nature in port cities, a notion that presupposes a dichotomy that postulates a nature outside of the city. Instead, our special issue foregrounds the dynamic interplay between natural features, urban landscapes and social structures. The former aspects appear in many guises – the impact of water (or lack thereof), soil and climate, as well as human interventions to control or alter the port city environment through infrastructural projects (drainage works, canals, breakwaters and so on).

Unlike many environmental histories, our special issue explores how changes in material conditions over time – whether human-engineered or ‘natural’ – impinged on a city’s social history, for example, at the very specific micro-level of a neighbourhood or community. As the case-studies in this special issue underline, urban expansion in or near water in particular brought with it new social problems as well as economic opportunities. Port cities were liminal spaces where the boundaries between natural and built landscapes constantly shifted and blurred. As Adrián Lerner Patrón’s study spotlights, the tension between urban modernization schemes and the ever-changing ecology of the Amazon generated socio-spatial inequalities in the riverine port of Iquitos, and especially in the water-fringed neighbourhood of Belén. Likewise, as Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi’s contribution demonstrates, land reclamation and infrastructural projects in Lagos, a city located on a low-lying, flood-prone island at the intersection of a lagoon, a river and the Atlantic Ocean, became a source of contestation between colonial authorities and Lagosians. Water often was, it should be stressed, as much an obstacle as a resource. In tropical ports like New Orleans, Colombo and Calcutta, as Olivia Durand, Sujit Sivasundaram and Anindita Ghosh emphasize in their respective contributions, the city’s semi-aquatic landscape and vulnerable location in low-lying wetland was, in fact, a major source of anxiety. Concerns ranged from the recurrence of floods to the danger of mosquito-borne diseases emerging from stagnant bodies of water. Similarly, the absence of sufficient fresh water supplies in locations such as Port Said and Odessa – discussed respectively by Lucia Carminati and Olivia Durand – impinged directly on matters related to sanitation and sewage disposal, rendering both urban environments at constant risk of becoming insalubrious. As port cities across the Global South experienced spectacular growth, it became increasingly clear to city planners and residents alike that local landscapes were unable, or unsuited, to support the urban fabric woven over them. Rather than being simple engines driving ever-increasing commodity trade, our contributors highlight the precarity and instability of modern port cities and the shifting sands onto which they were built.

Scholars of port cities have long generated some of the most compelling and fine-grained empirical studies of processes of social, racial and cultural differentiation in the modern era.Footnote ¹² These interventions have enriched our understanding of ubiquitous concepts such as cosmopolitanism and segregation that are used by historians, not just of port cities but across the discipline, to compare findings. But this rich strand of scholarship seldom analyses social structures in conjunction with the constantly evolving, interactive relationship between built and natural landscapes. The cityscape might thus appear, somewhat misleadingly, as a stable stage on which social and cultural life played out. However, as our contributors point out, the urban is always, and often precariously, embedded in natural environments, and its transformation over time impinged directly on the social. As Sujit Sivasundaram argues in his article on the construction of breakwaters and canals in Colombo, the port should be considered a colonial imposition on nature that had, and continues to have, profound repercussions for local residents and their livelihoods. The inequalities such impositions produced reverberated on a global scale, with the long-term coastal concentration of the world’s population having dramatic consequences to this day, a trend further pondered in Michael Goebel and Xinge Zhai’s conclusion.Footnote ¹³

Giving a more definite place to the (urban) environment in port city history requires a rethinking of the conventional spatial and temporal scales of port city historiography. Steam-powered shipping altered the global hierarchy of ports in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and newly emerging or dramatically expanding port cities in (semi-)colonies energized the ‘transformation of the world’. Although the transition from sail to steam was never complete and played out differently across regions, steam-powered shipping allowed for higher volumes of trade and more predictable schedules, and also enabled up-current riverine transport and the navigation of interoceanic channels. Yet, while we might hear, for example, that Singapore attracted trade away from Malacca, we rarely linger in Malacca to survey how this shift affected the city thereafter. Urbanists constantly remind each other of the importance of history in shaping cities (often under the label ‘path dependence’) but historians themselves, so often enthralled by a port city’s position at a specific ‘significant’ point in time and perhaps blinkered by the increasing specialization of the discipline, usually refrain from studying its development over the long term.Footnote ¹⁴ In many global histories, port cities make an appearance when connections peak, only to abruptly vanish from the narrative when shipping, trade and migration decline.

As the articles here show, it is vitally important that we pay attention to such contingencies in writing port city histories, and by implication, the constantly changing geography of globalization. One way of doing this is to flexibly adjust the bookends of the periods that usually frame our histories. As Michael Yeo’s article suggests, even a city’s ‘pre-history’ matters to its later character, function and trajectory. Numerous failed attempts at establishing a colonial settlement on northern Borneo directly impacted the eventual foundation of Sandakan as a foothold that was deeply conscious of its own precarity. Yeo’s findings hold true in much larger port cities as well. Singapore, often described as the quintessential port city, which, from its geographic position, seemed certain of success, was far from predestined for glory. The island lacked sufficient fresh water supplies and suitable soil to grow large amounts of rice and was difficult to defend from attacks, not to mention the fact that previous emporia on the island had seen their eventual demise. Many port cities were impromptu towns and their location was chosen, as Durand observes with reference to Odessa and New Orleans, because trade advantages outweighed concerns about habitability. Yet, a sense of this vulnerability is lacking in the historiography. Alternatively, instead of looking to a city’s pre-history, we can stretch our perspective forward beyond the typical ‘golden years’ of spectacular, explosive growth and booming trade. Looking at Iquitos decades after the rubber boom, for example, complicates our picture of this ‘boomtown’ which, as Lerner Patrón shows, continued to occupy an important place in the Amazon. Paying careful attention to founding moments as well as failures, and longer trajectories of growth and decline, can shed light on urban contingency and help nuance linear narratives of colonial expansion and global connectivity, which, by focusing primarily on successes and outcomes, often add a misleading air of inevitability and permanence to processes of port city formation.

This special issue also suggests different scales and definitions for port city history. On the one hand, many of the contributions to this issue examine smaller cities that have often been glossed over in favour of the ‘usual suspects’ (to mind come Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, Cape Town, New York, Liverpool and Hamburg) that are well represented in global history narratives and have generated a substantial historiography in their own right. Studying other towns with important ports serves to enrich existing narratives of globalization by demonstrating that similar processes played out in disparate places and in cities of very different sizes, while also complicating these narratives, especially as we look to cases where ‘success’ was far less certain. On the other hand, a reconsideration of scale means rethinking the definition of a port city. In the twenty-first century, when an inland city like Geneva can boast one of the most valuable freeports in the world (infamous for illicit trade in art) as well as hosting the operations of many of the world’s largest shipping (e.g. MSC) and commodity trading firms (e.g. Trafigura), historians should question whether a seaport alone is required to make a city into a port city. As Cyrus Schayegh’s article demonstrates, the construction of airports marked a point of continuity and divergence for cities like Beirut which had long been important seaports. Going forward, we ought to avoid overly simple periodizations and city typologies and look at more unconventional examples of city ‘portiness’.

As the contributions in our special issue underline, port cities were not merely portals of globalization or bridgeheads for some variation of modernity or colonialism, but crucially, also sites in which global circulation was put to the test, and in several cases, had its limits exposed.Footnote ¹⁵ While global historians have since taken up this non-linearity in many respects – for instance highlighting the ways in which globalization was resisted, halted or reversed, and the role of immobilities as well as the impact of disconnection and disentanglement – the study of modern port cities could add unique insights to this strand of scholarship.Footnote ¹⁶ The articles collected here repeatedly find citizens who, although clearly interlinked with global networks of production and exchange, also resisted state-driven projects of modernization in the city. For example, the transformation of Beirut from a major Levantine seaport into a regional aerocity benefited the city’s economic elite and created new employment opportunities for the labouring classes, but was contested, as Cyrus Schayegh suggests, by peasant communities whose lemon plantations had been earmarked for expropriation to make space for the airport. Anindita Ghosh’s contribution, by contrast, exposes the limits of governmentality in colonial Calcutta, examining sites of protest and everyday acts of resistance which contested imposed norms around tarred roads and open water bodies. These deep interventions into shared human and natural environments, even at a very specific and micro-level like the construction of a breakwater, shed light on the convergence of the colonial, the urban and the modern. As Sujit Sivasundaram underlines in his analysis of the legacies of aquatic infrastructures in Colombo, the alteration of coastal landscapes following major hydrological interventions did not only trigger protests against colonial city engineering and water management, but could also, following the changing uses of terrain, become a source of inter-communal conflict between Tamil and Sinhalese fishers. The question of colonial governmentality is also taken up by Guadalupe García in relation to mobility. Utilizing detailed city maps and adopting a history-from-below perspective, Garciá examines the socio-racial geography of nineteenth-century Havana, a particularly clear example of a walled colonial citadel, beyond which settlements of free people of colour and runaway slaves built a fugitive conduit to the sugar-producing hinterland.

Together, these studies show the importance of urban spaces at the margins in producing, reflecting and defying global and imperial hierarchies. They also pointedly reveal the incompleteness of any modernization project and expose the ‘lumpy’ nature of globalization processes as well as the methodological limitations of writing from above and outside the city rather than from within it and looking out.Footnote ¹⁷ By inviting our contributors to rethink the inter-relationships between environmental factors and social inequalities in some of the world’s fastest-growing cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and straddling geographies not usually thought of together, this special issue explores what a truly global, and at the same locally attuned and empirically fine-grained, history could look like.