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

现代港口城市在蒸汽时代的崛起，最近已发展成为全球历史学家感兴趣的一个主要话题。在漫长的19世纪下半叶，一些港口城市成为全球网络的节点。航运的很大一部分集中在几个不断扩大的海外港口，这些港口扩大了基础设施，以适应钢铁建造的越来越大的蒸汽船的需求。在德意志帝国，汉堡成为这样一个全球港口的所在地。在本世纪中叶，不比不来梅或L更重要的贸易中心，易北河畔的这座城市在几十年内不仅超过了当地的汉萨竞争对手：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，还没有基于经验的全球历史研究来研究汉堡作为德意志帝国最重要港口的转变。这一项目的目的是进行这样一项研究，以促进目前蓬勃发展的一些领域的研究：全球城市史；港口城市和海上全球化的历史；帝国德意志在国家一体化、跨国互联和帝国扩张之间的历史；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，港口城市主要被用作分析全球流动和网络的“枢纽”。与此同时，港口城市是在蒸汽时代可以体验全球化的最重要的地点。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，定义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，已经采取了各种努力来控制、限制或防止不必要的流动和纠缠形式。《帝国门户》将通过重建汉堡作为蒸汽全球化中心的全球城市历史，试图将我们对联系的理解载入史册。它将分析汉堡的港口，将其作为城市化和全球化的新颖体验的交汇点。因此，正如该项目旨在展示的那样，港口城市可以通过为历史学家提供具体的叙事和分析焦点，帮助他们发展以经验为基础的全球城市历史。

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.