CfA: "Imagining the Future of Ports in the Long Nineteenth Century" - Special Issue of The Journal of Transport History
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:
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The gap between development expectations and actual reality in various harbour contexts. 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.).
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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?
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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?
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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?
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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 two scholars from the University of Roma Tre and 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:
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Name, affiliation, and email address
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Short biography (150 words)
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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. 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.