Making Second Imperial Cities: Modern Ports, Colonial Connectivity, and Maritime Globalization

Abstract

The late 19th century witnessed the creation of a network of port cities as global and imperial hubs. These cities did not only grow physically, they also became politically and economically more significant, both in Western Europe and worldwide. Here, processes of urbanization, globalization, imperial expansion, and industrialization intertwined. The ports did not simply keep pace with the “transformation of the world”3, they set the pace. With the exception of London, Europe’s largest port cities were not capital cities.4 In the period of high imperialism in the 1880s until decolonization in the 1960s, they became “second imperial cities”, as I will argue in this article.