Session details
Organizer(s)
Hilde Greefs (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Keywords
Port Cities, Harbour Districts, Sailortowns
Abstract
Port cities are generally assumed to have been drivers of economic growth, generating wealth. Historical harbour districts, or so-called sailortowns, in contrast, are mainly defined as the opposite of progress. These neighbourhoods were the spatial entities between land and sea where maritime activities were concentrated and where seafarers, traveling salesmen, transit migrants and the like took up temporary residence and mingled with local communities. However, despite the rising interest in port cities as gateway cities and the challenges that came along with it, including growing populations, diversity and housing problems, harbour districts have been largely overlooked as significant urban spaces at the intersection of modernity and tradition. The sailortown historiography has mainly focused on the traditions and excesses of sailors ashore, neglecting the more local community – to which also seafarers could belong. This historiography also often overlooks the changing urban context of these urban spaces, which adapted to broader social, economic, political and technological changes. This explains why our image of waterfront districts is all too often based on negative and one-dimensional descriptions by contemporary authorities and elites, namely poor, rough and dangerous neighbourhoods. However, there is a growing consensus to consider sailortowns as urban districts where both transient and resident inhabitants met, interacted and cooperated. This panel aims to answer this call. It examines the characteristics and interactions of inhabitants in different sailortowns and explores how political, social, maritime and urban changes (re)shaped the waterfront district, and vice versa, within a comparative international framework in the long term. The central questions in this session are: How diverse were sailortowns in terms of class, gender and ethnic background? What significant differences can be detected between different port cities? What type of relations did seafarers establish with the more local community, and vice versa? What differences can we detect between foreign and local seamen? How did broader economic, political and technological changes affect the social composition of sailortowns? Did these waterfront districts maintain their maritime character over time? How were labour relations, economic and financial interactions organized in sailortowns?
Papers
White and Colonial Seamen in British Sailortowns (1914-1939)
Author(s)
Justine Cousin (University of Caen) and Joe Redmayne (Newcastle University)
Keywords
Sailortown, Britain Colonial, Seamen
Abstract
Waterfront district and sailortown populations are fluid and diverse, replenished and reconfigured by migration from overseas. These spaces accommodated sojourners and colonial settlers from an array of ethnicities who worked within the Britain’s maritime industry. British sailortowns developed specific racial characteristics that depended on the industrial structure of steamship companies, as well as kinship and boarding house networks operating within each town. The exigencies of the First World War introduced a significant population of British colonial subjects from the empire to the metropole’s sailortowns and maritime labour force, but at the same time raised questions about continued desirability of their presence.
Shipping employers socially engineered a split labour market within the merchant shipping industry to exploit a cheaper source of labour from colonised mariners. Hence, the British seamen’s union often targeted non-white seamen as scapegoats for any economic slowdown and decline of job opportunities within the industry. Hostility took place amid the xenophobic climate of war, exemplified with the passage of the War Time Acts, the Aliens Restriction Act and Coloured Alien Seamen’s Order in the 1920s. Public opinion was often hostile with fears of miscegenation blaming interracial relationships. Race riots even occurred in 1919 and 1930.
However, British sailortowns also experienced slow processes of acculturation. Many colonial seafarers settled and married local women, operated businesses and participated in civil institutions. To accommodate the influx of colonial seafarers, migrant businesspersons and boardinghouse keepers expanded their operations in sailortowns opening new accommodation, cafes and religious premises often granted by local councils. Some of them kept memories in oral histories of the variable politics of inclusion and exclusion. Among sections of the labour movement, solidarity began to develop through organisations like the Seamen’s Minority Movement that called for inter-racial trade unionism and sought to repeal the PC5 and Rota System that restrained employment of colonial seamen.
One foot Ashore. Accommodation and Lodging in Antwerp’s Waterfront District in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Author(s)
Jasper Segerink (University of Antwerp) and Kristof Loockx (University of Antwerp)
Keywords
Sailortown, Antwerp, Lodging
Abstract
Lodging houses were crucial institutions for a diverse population on the move in the nineteenth century city. They provided a bed, a roof, a meal, and possibly social contacts and information for the passer-by. Although migration to cities and their impact on political, social and economic transformations is by now a well-studied phenomenon, we crucially lack insight into the dynamics between transient mobile groups and the urban fabric. Port cities, and more specifically their waterfront districts, were especially marked by vast turnover rates of sailors, tramping artisans, merchants, and mobile prostitutes who, despite their fleeting presence, engendered long-term transformations on the urban social space. This paper argues that by investigating accommodation infrastructure - such as lodging houses, hostels, and inns - we can get a grasp on this mobile population and start to explore how they interacted with local communities. As such, this paper will first reconstruct the waterfront geography of accommodation by mapping the diversity of lodging houses through police inspection reports. Second, it will perform an in-depth analysis of two of these establishments and their social composition through a comparison of lodging registers and population registers. The hypothesis is that in these spaces we will encounter a population which is neither permanent nor transient, but instead in a continuum between these two, thus blurring our notion of this dichotomy while also rooting their presence firmly in urban history.
Foreign Female Sex Workers in an Atlantic Port City: Elite Prostitution in Late Nineteenth-Century Antwerp
Author(s)
Hilde Greefs (University of Antwerp) and Anne Winter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Keywords
Migration, Port Cities, Sex Workers
Abstract
This paper uses personal information from police files on immigration and prostitution as well as population records to reconstruct migration and residential trajectories of registered foreign sex workers in the Atlantic port city of Antwerp (Belgium) in the year 1880. It elucidates how their highly temporary patterns of mobility and clustered patterns of residence formed part of professional international migration circuits connecting brothels in various European cities, catering to the upmarket segments of Antwerp’s lively prostitution sector. By comparing their distinctive patterns of migration, residence and work with other female migrants on the one hand and more ‘irregular’ forms of prostitution on the other hand, the chapter highlights the ways in which the presence of this particular migrant group – dominated by French women – shaped the bohemian reputation of the port’s notorious entertainment district in the late nineteenth century.