Imperial Gateway. Hamburg, Imperial Germany and the Making of a Global Port

• Applicant: Dr. Lasse Heerten
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278804377

The rise of modern port cities in the age of steam has recently developed into a major topic of interest for global historians. In the second half of the long nineteenth century, a number of port cities were turned into nodal points of global networks. A huge part of shipping was being concentrated in a few expanding oversea ports, which extended their infrastructure to fit the needs of the ever bigger steam ships built of iron and steel. In the German Empire, Hamburg became the site of such a global port. In the mid-century not yet more important a center of trade than Bremen or Lübeck, within a few decades the city by the river Elbe outstripped not only its local Hanseatic competitors: on the eve of the First World War, Hamburg had become the prime port on the European continent. So far, however, there is no empirically based global historical study of the transformation of Hamburg as Imperial Germany’s most important port. This project aims at producing such a study to contribute to a number of currently flourishing fields of research: global urban history; the histories of port cities and maritime globalization; of Imperial Germany between national integration, transnational interconnections and imperial expansion; the history of migration and transmigration; and the histories of labor and capitalism.In the recent literature, port cities have predominantly been used as “hubs” to analyse global flows and networks. At the same time, port cities were the foremost sites where globalization could be experienced in the age of steam. Before containerization and flight traffic moved the ports and shipping far away from the everyday world of most of us today, ports were situated in the heart of rapidly growing urban centres, defining the economic life of these cities – and of global trade and transport. However, port cities can also remind us of the various efforts that have been undertaken to control, limit, or prevent unwanted forms of mobility and entanglement. “Imperial Gateway” will try to historicize our understandings of connections by reconstructing the global urban history of Hamburg as a central site of steam globalization. It will analyse Hamburg’s port as a site where novel experiences of urbanization and globalization intersected. Port cities, as the project aims to show, can thus help historians to develop empirically grounded global urban histories by providing them with a concrete narrative and analytical focal point.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Dorothee Brantz; Professor Dr. Andreas Eckert; Ursula Richenberger; Dr. Christoph Strupp; Professor Dr. Jürgen Zimmerer
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Sebastian Conrad; Professor Dr. Paul Nolte