Atlantic Port Cities Research Articles

The Sierra Leone Hinterland and the Provisioning of Early Freetown, 1792–1803

The Sierra Leone Hinterland and the Provisioning of Early Freetown, 1792–1803 Philip Misevich Freetown sits uncomfortably within the broader context of African urban and colonial history. Its establishment in the late-eighteenth century predates the era of formal European colonial expansion in Africa by more than half a century. As a planned urban center, the town’s early development also challenges the prevailing notion that African cities are relatively modern creations.1 Freetown is thus faced with an identity crisis: in many ways, it seems to share more in common with the Atlantic-oriented ports that dotted the American littoral between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries than it does with Africa’s later industrial centers.2 Yet the antislavery sentiment surrounding the city’s origin and its later legitimization as a British colony separate Freetown from both the colonial cities that developed in the later part of the nineteenth century and from most of the Atlantic port cities which grew largely from their role in the slave trade. Despite these unique characteristics, Freetown’s long-term evolution as a city followed a familiar trajectory. In the century after its establishment, the city slowly developed an asymmetrical relationship with its hinterland. As British territorial expansion enlarged the size and scope of the abolitionist settlement, people living in the region came to depend increasingly on the colonial government for certain specialized functions. In exchange, the Sierra Leone relied upon its hinterland as the breadbasket to sustain the city’s growing population.3 However, the long-term picture of Freetown’s dominance over the countryside masks the complexities that its settlers faced in forging commercial relations with the Sierra Leone hinterland. Particularly in its early phase, the Sierra Leone Company struggled not only against the uncertainties that faced all newly-emerging settlements, but also with hostility from the inhabitants of a region still widely immersed in the Atlantic slave trade. This essay focuses on the origins of the Company’s efforts to secure a trade based in agricultural commodities with its neighbors. Based largely on the records of the Sierra Leone Company, it examines the early struggles in establishing trade with the hinterland, the way the Company’s commerce was organized in comparison to the slave trade, and its volume and spatial distribution. The results demonstrate that in Freetown’s infant stages, power rested in the hands of the Africans of the interior and not, as it would in the later-nineteenth century, with the Europeans and liberated Africans in the city. Indeed in the 1790s it was indigenous inhabitants who developed and supported the commercial networks that ensured Freetown’s early survival and subsequent growth.4 The Establishment of Commercial Factories North and South of Freetown The history of Freetown’s establishment is well known and need not be rehearsed in great depth. In 1787, an attempt to found the “Province of Freedom” at Granville Town on the south bank of the Sierra Leone estuary ended in disaster, with a third of the inhabitants dying from exposure to unfamiliar diseases and most of the survivors abandoning the settlement to seek livelihoods elsewhere. In 1790, the few remaining inhabitants were drawn into a conflict between their Temne landlord and an American slave trader which led to the total destruction of the original settlement. The town was reestablished in 1791 under the control of the Sierra Leone Company, its population expanding considerably early in the following year with the arrival of a group of free blacks from Nova Scotia. Excitement was in the air. The new settlers arrived singing a hymn of prayer: “The day of Jubilee is come; Return ye ransomed sinners home.”5 The air of jubilation was not to last long. It quickly became clear that the location of the new “Freetown” was far from ideal for agricultural purposes. A report on the state of the settlement in 1794 found that “the land adjoining to the settlement has proved by no means as good as every account received before the inception of the Company had led them to expect.” The overall assessment of Freetown’s geographic merits, however, was positive enough to keep the settlement from being relocated...

Introduction: Port Jews in the Atlantic world Jewish history

In recent years, port Jews have become increasingly familiar figures in modern European Jewish history. The term 'port Jews' was introduced to highlight the distinctive role and experience of Jewish merchants who lived in dynamic Mediterranean and Atlantic port cities in early modern Europe, cities such as Livorno, Trieste, Amsterdam, London, and Bordeaux. Perceived in their day as acculturated and useful agents, purveyors and facilitators of international maritime com merce, they benefited from relatively favorable civil-legal status and trod a particular road to modernity.1 This issue of Jewish History proposes to take port Jews across the Atlantic Ocean and make them familiar figures in the Jewish history of the Americas as well. Several scholars have located port Jews beyond the early modern centers of western and central Europe, with some extending the geographic and chronological parameters of their discussions to include cities such as Odessa, Singapore, and Cape Town, and the experiences of Jews in port cities during the era of mass migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries.2 The following articles broaden consideration of port Jews in a way that is crucial to the early modern period itself. Initial studies of port Jews focused on the processes by which these Jews became rooted in a local milieu and integrated into the civic realm, in effect seeing them as resident subjects or citizens in the making, on the road toward legal equality. But, as I have argued elsewhere, routes are as important as roots in the study of merchant communities, and therefore, more attention should be paid to the actual movement of port Jews and their far-flung human, commercial, and cultural networks.3 For the early modern period, there is one vital pattern of movement and exchange that scholars of port Jews must address: Just as early modern

The Atlantic Coast of German Trade: German Rural Industry and Trade in the Atlantic, 1680–1840

Throughout the last decade a number of rather detailed studies on eighteenth-century Atlantic merchants and merchant colonies in Atlantic port cities has been published. The works ofJacob Price, David Hancock, Jonathan Israel, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, and Manuel Bustos Rodríguez demonstrate the growing historical interest in maritime trade and Atlantic studies. All of these works carry on the investigative traditions of the authors respective countries, represented, for example, by Bernard Bailyn's works on the New England merchants, Pierre and Huguette Chaunu's and Paul Butel's studies on the economies of the Spanish and French Atlantic, and the investigations of Antonio García-Baquero González on the topic of Spanish Atlantic trade. As a pervasive pattern within this field of research it can be observed that, since the foundations had been laid with these classical studies, the focus of historical inquiry has shifted from quantitative investigations (that is, those on the currents of ships, goods, and precious metals) and from studies on the legal frameworks regulating the Atlantic trades to detailed studies of the individuals responsible for this trade. Arising from their countries colonial pasts, it is not surprising that most of these author's works concentrate on the colonial trade of the Western European sea powers, thus neglecting the central and eastern interiors of the continent. In the 1960s and 70s, some German historians, notably Hermann Kellenbenz and Hans Pohl, published studies in this area, but it has lain fallow ever since. The aim of this article is to shed some light on the perspectives that might open up by reconsidering the influence of Atlantic trade on Central Europe in the Early Modern period.

The forging of an Atlantic port city: socio-economic and physical transformations in Cork, 1660–1700

This article investigates the socio-economic and morphological aspects of how the city of Cork, having lost the salient elements of its medieval character in the early 1600s, transformed into a prosperous Atlantic port city during the period of renaissance it experienced between 1660–1700. Despite the political upheavals caused by the expulsions of the Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s, the city increased in size and population from the early 1660s onwards as it began to thrive on the provisions trade to the colonial plantations of British America. In the process, Cork assumed a higher rank in the general European urban hierarchy.

The Historical Geography of Cork's Transformation from a Late Medieval Town into an Atlantic Port City, 1600–1700

Restricted accessAbstractFirst published June 1999The Historical Geography of Cork's Transformation from a Late Medieval Town into an Atlantic Port City, 1600–1700Mark McCarthyView all authors and affiliationsVolume 26, Issue 1https://doi.org/10.1177/033248939902600107

The Crises of Atlantic Port Cities 1880 to 1920

The industrialization of shipping, a process which accelerated rapidly between the 1870s and 1910s, induced and accompanied dramatic changes in European and American port cities. Never before or since have so few cities on both sides of the Atlantic concentrated such a large proportion of the world's commerce. Thanks to the expansion of shipping, the great port cities of the Atlantic world acquired a significant manufacturing sector, including shipbuilding, and met the needs of their growing population for food and energy supplies. The reduction of freight rates and the expansion of shipping capacity and services brought considerable benefits to the urban economy. But the growth of shipping was also a factor in waves of migration, environmental and public health problems, traffic congestion, substandard housing, strikes, and conflict over strategies for development.

Book Review: Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850

Book Review: Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850

Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. Edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Pp. xvii, 302. Notes. Index. No price.)

Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. Edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Pp. xvii, 302. Notes. Index. No price.) - Volume 49 Issue 2

Atlantic port cities: economy, culture, and society in the Atlantic world, 1650-1850

Atlantic port cities: economy, culture, and society in the Atlantic world, 1650-1850

Technology and the Market: George Eastman and the Origins of Mass Amateur Photography

Review Essay TECHNOLOGY AND THE CITY J O S E F W. K O N V I T Z, MARK H. ROSE, AND I O E L A. TARR For at least a century the politics, business, and social discourse of urban Americans have depended on those technological systems that historians label infrastructure: waterworks, sewers, transit, port im­ provements, communications networks, and energy systems.1 Yet scarcely more than twenty years ago Roy Lubove could still lament that “the existing body of urban history offers a surfeit of narratives about cities, and an abundance of tales about life in cities; but it largely fails to explain the city-building process in relation to technol­ ogy and social organization.”2 During the past two decades, however, scholars have produced a large number of studies focused on the relationship between the city and technology. Later in this essay we Dr. Konvi i z. is professor of history at Michigan State University. His article “William J. Wilgus and Engineering Projects to Improve the Port of New York, 1900-1930“ (Technology and Culture 30 [April 1989]) is part of a larger study of Atlantic port cities during the world wars. Dr. Rose, a member of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Michigan Technological University, publishes in several areas of historiography as well as in the history of technology, politics, and urban change, including (with Bruce E. Seely) “Getting the Interstate Built: Road Engineers and the Implementation of Public Policy, 1955—1985” (Journal of Policy History 2 (January 1990]). He is the general editor of the Temple University Press monograph series Technology and Urban Growth. Dr. Tarr is professor of history and public policy and associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His book Technology and the Pise of the Networked City in Europe and America (coedited with Gabriel Dupuy) was awarded the Abel Wolman Prize by the Public Works Historical Society in 1989. 'Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870—1900 (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 217-50; Teaford, “Finis for Tweed and Steffens: Rewriting the History of Urban Rule,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 146—47; and Joel A. Tarr and Josef W. Konvitz, “Patterns in the Development of the Urban Infrastructure,” in American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review, ed. Howard Gillette, Jr., and Zane L. Miller (New York, 1987), pp. 195-226. 2Roy Lubove, “The Urbanization Process: An Approach to Historical Research,” in American Urban History: An interpretive Reader with Commentaries, 2d ed., ed. Alexander B. Callow, Jr. (New York, 1973), p. 663.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3102-0007$01.00 284 Technology and the City 285 will address that literature, focusing in particular on changing pat­ terns of topical choice and interpretive emphasis.3 At the outset, one must emphasize that the foundation studies in this held, many long out of print, remain useful on several counts. The intellectual frameworks articulated by pioneer scholars continue to exercise a powerful if frequently unperceived influence. Naturally, the value of works by pioneers in both urban history and the history of technology is not determined by whether they anticipated in detail the findings of contemporary scholars. These early works remain a vital part of historical literature because their authors brought a sense of connectedness to different historical topics, a sense that is often missing in contemporary works. They wrote about wholes, we write about segments. Hence, a historiographical essay such as this one allows us to glimpse a portion of our own intellectual and social history. Treatment of the literature in an evolutionary and topical fashion, then, permits several generalizations. First, historical study of tech­ nology and the city has focused on technologies that enabled cities to function more efficiently and that, in turn, often led to improvements in the quality of urban life. One result of this approach—and this is our second point—was that historians until recently have been fairly consistent in treating the city as something plastic, something capable of altering its own shape and functions in response to the imperatives of autonomous machines and systems. Third...