Comparative Port History of Rotterdam and Antwerp, 1880-2000

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2005 by Jarvis, Adrian

Ferry de Goey (ed.), Comparative Port History of Rotterdam and Antwerp, 1880-2000, Aksant, Amsterdam (2004), 264 pp., euro22.50.

Until about twenty years ago the history of ports was largely the preserve of economic geographers and of the writers of 'insider' commemorative narrative histories. This situation has changed dramatically, with papers on 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 needs of ports urged on by the 'shipping revolution' has also mandated an interest in the industrial archaeology of ports as huge areas of dock estates all around the world have been redeveloped for new uses. With the passage of relatively few years the amount of historical research available for publication has come far to exceed the capacities of such journals as JTH. The fruits of some research projects have appeared as monographs, but probably rather more have appeared as specialist collections of papers.

This book is one such. There has been a huge amount of research going on in Antwerp and Rotterdam for some 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 Present Day and Struggling for Leadership: Antwerp-Rotterdam Port Competition between 1870-2000, and several of the names of contributors to the work presently under consideration are also to be found in the earlier ones. The papers in Comparative Port History and Struggling for Leadership have been chewed over in international workshops involving port historians from many countries and the published versions refined in the light of those discussions

The present collection consists of an introduction and eight papers, all either written or co-authored by Reginald Loyen, one of the most energetic of the younger school of port historians. They are grouped in three sections - 'Historiography and method', 'Cargo', 'Costs' - and are equipped, in addition to their references, with an extremely useful nineteen-page bibliography and a less thorough, but still very worthwhile, index to the whole volume.

The papers provide a thorough analysis of variations in the two ports' relative importance over time: the only area in which I felt that they were slightly deficient was in the question of port governance - policy making and implementation. But that is one of very few questions which are either ducked or evaded, for taken as a whole the collection does an excellent job in unpicking and scrutinising in detail most of what we thought we knew about the history of the two ports and, of course, revealing that it was all much more complicated than that.

But that does lead into what I think may be a weakness in the general approach. The papers are all pretty numerical, and numerical evidence, for these as for any other ports, is based on prepared data. By whom and for exactly what purpose the data were prepared and provided varies from port to port, but all such data sets have one thing in common, which is that they were prepared by insiders - typically a ruling clique within an ostensibly elective body - to present a picture to outsiders. That brings about a more insidious problem than the mere possibility of 'spin doctors' making the figures look pretty, because it assumes that the people who provided the figures knew what was really happening out on the quaysides. If, for example, expeditious berth allocation for inward-bound vessels depended on the payment of substantial bribes to the harbourmaster's staff (which we know in some ports it did) that would be an operating cost known to, and taken into account by, port users but not known to the pallid-faced lad at a high desk in the dock offices who worked out all the figures, or to the more important people who relied on the figures he recorded. I know that in Liverpool in the late nineteenth century around 0.5 per cent of the entire lineal quayage was unusable because it was covered 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 ever any port anywhere of which that was entirely true? Clearly one has to use such information, because it's the best available, but it has its limits.

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

Adrian Jarvis, Centre for Port and Maritime History, Liverpool