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

现代港口城市在蒸汽时代的兴起最近已成为全球历史学家感兴趣的一个主要话题。在漫长的世纪后半叶，一些港口城市成为全球网络的节点。很大一部分航运集中在几个不断扩张的海外港口，这些港口扩大了基础设施，以适应越来越大的钢铁蒸汽船的需求。在德意志帝国，汉堡成为这样一个全球港口的所在地。在19世纪中叶，汉堡还没有成为比不莱梅或吕贝克更重要的贸易中心，但在几十年内，这座位于易北河畔的城市不仅超过了汉萨同盟的竞争对手：在第一次世界大战前夕，汉堡已经成为欧洲大陆的主要港口。然而，到目前为止，还没有一个基于经验的全球性历史研究汉堡作为帝国德国最重要的港口的转变。该项目旨在进行这样一项研究，以促进目前蓬勃发展的一些研究领域：全球城市史;港口城市和海洋全球化的历史;民族融合、跨国相互联系和帝国扩张之间的帝国德国;移民和轮回的历史;以及劳动力和资本主义的历史。在最近的文献中，港口城市主要被用来作为“枢纽”来分析全球流动和网络。与此同时，港口城市是蒸汽时代体验全球化的最重要场所。在集装箱化和航空运输使港口和航运远离我们今天大多数人的日常生活之前，港口位于快速发展的城市中心的中心，决定了这些城市的经济生活-以及全球贸易和运输。然而，港口城市也可以提醒我们，为了控制、限制或防止不必要的流动和纠缠，人们做出了各种努力。“帝国门户”将试图通过重建汉堡作为蒸汽全球化中心地点的全球城市历史，使我们对联系的理解历史化。它将分析汉堡港作为城市化和全球化的新经验的场所。港口城市，正如该项目的目的是显示，因此可以帮助历史学家开发经验为基础的全球城市史，为他们提供一个具体的叙述和分析的焦点。

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.