Port Towns and Urban Cultures ― International Histories of the Waterfront C.1700-2000

Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of maritime and urban space, port towns were sites of complex cultural exchanges. This book, the product of international scholarship, offers innovative and challenging perspectives on the cultural histories of ports, ranging from eighteenth-century Africa to twentieth-century Australasia and Europe. The essays in this important collection explore two key themes; the nature and character of ‘sailortown’ culture and port-town life, and the representations of port towns that were forged both within and beyond urban-maritime communities. The book’s exploration of port town identities and cultures, and its use of a rich array of methodological approaches and cultural artefacts, will make it of great interest to both urban and maritime historians. It also represents a major contribution to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of coastal studies.

Brad Beaven is Reader in Social and Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He has written widely on British popular culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the author of two monographs,Leisure, Citizenship and Working Class Men, 1850-1945 and Visions of Empire. Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870-1939.

Karl Bell is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His research explores the supernatural in nineteenth-century Britain. He is the author of two monographs,The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914 andThe Legend of Spring-heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures.

Robert James is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He researches British society’s leisure habits in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and is author ofPopular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain 1930-39: a round of cheap diversions? and co-editor ofHollywood and the World.