Port City Lives: Mobilities, Networks, Encounters, Blackburne House, Liverpool (review)

Organized by Liverpool University's Centre for Port and Maritime Histories, this innovative two-day interdisciplinary workshop marked the relaunch of the centre. Port studies might be expected to involve the giant skeletal cranes that dominate quayside skylines, terminal logistics, dock-road layouts complex as airport runways, and the invisible diverse contents of all those seemingly identical containers differentiated only by their matt reds and blues and their stencilled names: Maersk, Lloyd and so on. But the organizers' focus was on 'lives'. Therefore the discussions concerned those in the borderlands who deliver and unload the goods, those such as sex-industry workers who profit from proximity to seafarers and the liminality of the waterfront, and those who organize trafficking from their high panelled offices far from the seagulls' cries.

Appropriately, we were in a space endowed by cotton-broker and abolitionist, George Holt, who opened it as a girls' school in 1844. His profits enabled many privileged Merseyside girls to learn within these stylish walls and later to go on to Girton or St Hilda's. Edwina Currie sang hymns at morning assemblies in the very hall where we assembled for our more earthly purposes.

If the focus is on 'lives', then the questions have to be How did people in very different positions function together? What was the impact of the port on their lives, and what was their impact on all the aspects of the port's life? And the ports under scrutiny ranged from Liverpool itself to Nantes, Barcelona, Thessaloniki, Matamoros, Rotterdam, Salvador de Bahia, Hamburg and Cork, as well as Tunis, Portsmouth and Hull. It was an international gathering and speakers were international in their concerns. And indeed, as both the keynote speakers showed, the people in question were global citizens, whether elite British merchants easily connecting to New York or the slavery triangle, or black seafarers in Cardiff with a Pan-Africanist interest.

Strands at this Port City Lives conference included marginal workers, commerce and trade networks, networking and organization in the early twentieth century, case studies of early modern cities, culture and representation, memory and 'restructuring, redevelopment and renewal'.

The comprehensive call for papers had explained the conference aims as:

to foment a critical discussion about the interdisciplinary potential of the port city as a space of encounter and a hub in multiple, intersecting histories and geographies . . . to bring together participants from across academic disciplines, geographical and historical specialisms, in order to think together about how we might develop new theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying port cities through attention to the individuals, communities and networks that inhabited them.

And indeed the discussions about methodology were refreshing and generous, although there was not sufficient time to do justice to all that might have been possible.

Only one strand took place at any one time, which meant that this small conference (about fifty attended) was enjoyably cohesive. Conviviality was assisted by the circular tables, so it was almost like a nightclub with the speakers as diners in turn getting up briefly to do their number. Participants had the opportunity to get to know each other and to share insights from a range of perspectives and disciplines, principally maritime history, business history, cultural geography, and migration studies, folklore and linguistics.

There were two keynote speeches. First business historian Dr Sheryllynne Haggerty (University of Nottingham) gave an energetic and energizing presentation about networks in port history. She showed the benefits of interdisciplinarity by using a newly-developed computer programme which displays networks - in her case, of elite members of nineteenth-century Liverpool institutions including clubs and anti/slavery initiatives. Because the programme can illuminate the networks in different periods of history, the spider-like maps created showed the extent to which leading business-men stopped being interconnected, and how their international connections changed. Every participant wanted to know 'Can I have such a programme?' The answer was a regretful 'Not yet, because there's no funding to make it available.'

The second keynote speaker, geographer...