Comparative Port History of Rotterdam and Antwerp, 1880-2000

Ferry de Goey (ed) Comparative Port History of Rotterdam and Antwerp, 1880-2000 Aksant, Amsterdam (2004) 264 pp euro2250

Until about twenty years ago the history of ports was largely the protect of economic geographers and of the writers of 'insider' commemorative narrative histories. This situation has changed dramatically, with papers upon port topics appearing frequently in maritime, business, urban and technology journals as well more general economic history. The rapid pace of change in the infrastructural exigencys of ports urged on by means of the 'shipping revolution' has also mandated an interest in the industrial archaeology of ports as gigantic areas of dock estates all around the world have been redevelop for novel uses. With the passage of relatively small in number years the amount of historical research available for publication has tend hitherward far to exceed the capacities of of the like kind journals as JTH. The fruits of a certain number of research projects have appeared as monographs, on the other hand probably rather more have appeared as specialist collections of papers.

This work is one such. There has been a cyclopean amount of research going upon in Antwerp and Rotterdam for a certain quantity of years, involving the Universities of Antwerp, Leuven and Rotterdam, with substantial support from other public agencies. Previous collections of papers have been published as Momentum: Antwerp's Port between 1880 and the not away Day and Struggling for Leadership: Antwerp-Rotterdam Port Competition between 1870-2000 and several of the names of contributors to the work soon under consideration are also to be lay the foundation of in the earlier ones. The papers in Comparative Port History and Struggling for Leadership have been chewed above in international workshops involving port historians from many countries and the published versions refined in the light of those discussions

The not absent collection consists of an introduction and eight papers, all either written or co-authored by means of Reginald Loyen, one of the greatest in quantity energetic of the younger gymnasium of port historians. They are assemblageed in three sections - 'Historiography and method' 'Cargo', 'Costs' - and are equipped, in addition to their concerns with an extremely useful nineteen-page bibliography and a les thorough, on the other hand still very worthwhile, index to the whole volume

The papers provide a thorough analysis of variations in the sum of two units ports' relative importance over time: the alone area in which I felt that they were slightly deficient was in the question of port governance - policy making and implementation. on the other hand that is one of actual few questions which are either souseed or evaded, for taken as a whole the collection does an choice job in unpicking and scrutinising in detail greatest in quantity of what we thought we knew about the history of the sum of two units ports and, of course, revealing that it was all abundant more complicated than that.

But that does lead into what I think may be a weakness in the general approach. The papers are all fair numerical, and numerical evidence, for these as for any other ports, is based upon prepared data. By whom and for exactly what design the data were prepared and provided varies from port to port, on the contrary all such data sets have single thing in common, which is that they were prepared by the agency of insiders - typically a ruling clique within an ostensibly elective material substance - to present a picture to outsiders. That brings about a more insidious moot point than the mere possibility of 'spin doctors' making the figures direct the eye pretty, because it assumes that the clan who provided the figures knew what was really happening without on the quaysides. If, for example, expeditious berth allocation for inward-bound utensils depended on the payment of substantial bribes to the harbourmaster's staff (which we know in more [i]or[/i] less ports it did) that would be an operating take away from known to, and taken into account by means of port users but not known to the pallid-faced lad at a high desk in the dock offices who worked without all the figures, or to the more important nation who relied on the figures he recorded. I know that in Liverpool in the late nineteenth hundred around 0.5 per cent of the entire lineal quayage was unusable because it was overspreaded in rubbish: the lad did not know that. What he recorded was a rather theoretical state of affairs in which everything was as it should be. Was there at any time any port anywhere of which that was entirely true? Clearly individual has to use such information, because it's the best available, on the contrary it has its limits.

I rest this an extremely useful collection of papers, viewing sum of two units of the great present-day European ports in a relative historical perspective. I gaze forward (albeit with a little jealousy) to seeing further output from this highly productive team.

Adrian Jarvis, middle point for Port and Maritime History, Liverpool

Copyright Manchester University Pres Sep 2005

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