Abstract
The history of port-cities in recent times is quite unlike the depiction in older histories in which the port was only a point of embarkation or disembarkation with harbours, docks and warehouses. Now, it has become inseparable from the study of maritime units as a pelagic space. Conceivably this association had taken root after Fernand Braudel brought out his famous tome The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The Mediterranean has thus been used, as Francois Gipoulox says, as a metaphor by historians studying the entire network—social and physical—of ports, the sea-lanes, the hinterlands, and the maritime and cultural relationships, gives the geographical region a particular coherence. It connotes a transnational region in which the ports emerge as ‘global cities’ or ‘gateways’. Those were also ‘hubs’ which evolved into distinct urban spaces of a particular social character.
The overarching framework of studies on cross-cultural or trans-cultural contact provides the basic organising principle for most articles written in this volume. That is to go beyond the conventional political, geographical and cultural boundaries and detect the processes of interaction across civilisations and cultures. In these processes the ports were ‘gateways’ and also catalysts. The editor of the volume states more definitively that many of the articles are built on the foundation of the network theory. This theory emphasises relations and network rather than structure and functions of the objects studied.
Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the volume has two parts, one devoted to ‘conceptual framework’ and the other to ‘case studies’. Rila Mukherjee, in the first chapter of the conceptual framework, presents the subject, the ports, from three angles. First, ports are not merely points on a tangled web of networks, but ‘node[s] in the global flows’. The second perspective is that of the port as a social and ethnic crucible on the maritime frontier. The third angle is that of the ports being a water frontier. She mentions three kinds of ports, namely, seaports, estuarine ports and river (fluvial) ports. The ‘maritime optic’, or what one might descriptively state as the connection between the sea ‘as the principal avenue’ and the node or the sea port, makes it possible for one to focus on the great processes of history, ‘in the Columbian exchange, in environmental imperialism and in the rise of plantation societies’. These are processes on which meta-narratives are constructed. The author also mentions that the ‘maritime optic’ brings to light the flow of ideas, cultures and commodities, technology transfers and multiple cultural crossings as witnessed amongst ‘mariners, monks, merchants and monarchs’. However, it needs to be asked, that whether the connotation of the term ‘maritime optic’ could be the same as the seaward view of these flows; or a view of the maritime space from the vantage point of seaports or its hinterland. The seaport, after all, is only one maritime feature; though at the land’s edge. But the entire maritime universe extends over a much greater geographical space including islands and different forms of habitats which should be taken into consideration while discussing global exchanges. Thus the study of seaports, while immensely useful for understanding cultural crossing and global flows, should be considered only as a particular form of input for the study of subjects like the Columbian exchange and environmental imperialism, the entirety of which cannot be grasped only from its vantage point.
The second article in this section is by M.N. Pearson. A discussion on the question of how substantial foreign trade, especially by sea, was (and is) to an economy is his point of departure. Initially he treats the question in terms of ‘how much’, or the quantitative aspect that made foreign trade and that too by sea, the preferred option. He argues that the sea became a preferred option only by the nineteenth century because of technological reasons. One of the key issues involved in Pearson’s argument is the relation between the terrestrial and the maritime, and he questions the position that there has been a historiographical bias in favour of the land and not for the sea, and concludes that port-cities are ‘inevitably Janus faced’. The article then goes on to delineate the three important characteristics of the ‘Janus faced’ nature of the ports: its inland depth and connection (how far inland), its relation with the littoral and their location as gateways. Finally it discusses the port’s most distinctive character that is cosmopolitanism.
The essays in the first section of the case studies are arranged broadly within the classification set by the conceptual framework. The only exception is the article by Rashmi on the evolution of Madras as an urban space. She emphasises the importance of space and the process of its production but departs from the ‘the description of ports as merely “gateways”‘. Suchandra Ghosh discusses the historical evolution of the port Barbarikon through its connection with the empires of western Asia, mainly from the point of view of political and administrative control. The aspect of network has been discussed in the context of the products of the hinterland and the routes that emanated from the region and connected the latter with the port. Rila Mukherjee discusses the development of a port based polity in the Bengal delta or bhati region where the political and the agrarian frontiers were experiencing simultaneous expansion during the sixteenth century. Here during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, during Mughal territorial expansion, a process of state formation with maritime links was witnessed. Radhika Seshan focuses on Chaul in the west coast and Porto Novo in the east, to discuss how these developed as gateways, and in what relation those ports stood to their respective hinterlands. A similar treatment of the port and hinterland connection and ‘dynamics’ is to be found in the article by G. Naga Sridhar on the eighteenth century Andhra coast.
In the case study section on Southeast Asia, Kenneth R. Hall focuses on issues arising largely from shifts in methodological perspectives and recent empirical researches. According to Hall there has been a significant shift in the past few decades in the study of urbanism in social sciences. What is important now is the understanding of urban identities and forms ‘as cultural constructions’. Hall titles this as the revisionist approach, especially in studying cross-cultural relations and goes on to study cross-cultural commercial competition on the eastern Indian Ocean in the pre-Vasco-da-Gama epoch. The Southeast Asian section has two articles on Philippines by Antoni Picazo Muntaner and Cynthia Neri Zayas, Muntaner’s article is based on network theory for the study of ports, while Zayas approaches the transformation of moorage into ports from a cultural anthropological angle.
The study of the evolution of networks and gateways is extended to Japan and Vietnam in the East Asian section, in which Bebio Amaro and Ilicia Sprey writes on Nagasaki as an emporium and the trade on the Vietnam coastline. The final section is devoted to European context in which Amelia Polonia discusses the Portuguese seaports as gateways and Amandio Barros makes a case for ports and commercial networks in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
All I all, this is an excellent volume with new and invigorating ideas on commercial networks.