This article addresses the intertwined development of the port cities of Rotterdam and Antwerp into border zones that took place with the upswing of steam navigation in the upcoming age of high mobility. It focuses on administrative practice, namely local authorities’ approaches to identifying and registering mobile people, to shed new light on the often-presumed shift in migration control in this period. Scrutiny of the paperwork used and produced by local authorities tasked with migration control suggests that administrative practice does not fit into coherent narratives of high modernity characterised by the increasing relevance of nationality, border control management, and a growing impact of the nation-state. Instead, this era is characterised by the layering of control practices: resilient practices – some dating back to pre-modern times, some lacking coherence; the practices of individual police agents; and national policies.
The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volume and explicates its guiding questions and conceptual framework. Our focus is on the Baltic Sea region, considered as a multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict and its specific legacy of hospitality. In terms of guiding concepts for the empirical chapters, this introduction combines issues of host–guest relations with the problems of securitization. It is our contention that hospitality in Baltic migration contexts, from the turn of the first millennium until the twentieth century and beyond, triggered security issues both on the part of arriving strangers and receiving host communities. Why and how were multifarious categories of guests and strangers—migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries, vagrants, vagabonds, etc.—portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity? Under what circumstances did hospitality turn into hostility? How was hospitality practiced and contained spatially? By focusing predominantly on coastal contexts as spaces for meetings and confrontations, we decouple the study of hospitality and migration from state-centered methodology. Instead, we offer a close-up view on hospitality dilemmas and practices of dealing with arriving guests and strangers, which we consider in transhistorical perspective. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters.
In the late nineteenth century, with the expansion of their harbours and the growth of transatlantic mobility, the port cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam became home to economically important and large migrant communities. In a context marked by the often-claimed rise of the nation state, when national legislation concerning nationality and citizenship was shifting, local authorities and citizens played an important but still underestimated role when it came to enforcing the naturalisation of foreign nationals. Applications for naturalisation in both Antwerp and Rotterdam were firmly rooted in the local context, and economic performance was key to the police commissar’s support of an applicant’s case towards the national authorities. By comparatively analysing individual applications for naturalisation in Antwerp and Rotterdam, this paper argues that the close relationship between the nation-state and the mechanisms of legal inclusion and exclusion on which it rested, has to be relativised. Aan het eind van de negentiende eeuw werden de steden Antwerpen en Rotterdam, dankzij de uitbreiding van hun havens en de groei van de trans-Atlantische mobiliteit, de thuisbasis van grote en economisch belangrijke migrantengemeenschappen. In een periode die in de historiografie vaak gekenmerkt wordt door de veronderstelde opkomst van de natiestaat en veranderende wetgeving omtrent nationaliteit en burgerschap, speelden lokale overheden en burgers een belangrijke, maar nog vaak onderschatte rol bij het bewerkstelligen van naturalisatie van mensen met een migratieachtergrond. Zowel in Antwerpen als in Rotterdam waren naturalisatieverzoeken duidelijk gesitueerd in de lokale context van de aanvrager. Zo was het economische succes van een aanvrager een doorslaggevende factor voor het verkrijgen van steun van de politiecommissaris. Deze steun vergrootte de kans van slagen van een naturalisatieaanvraag bij de nationale overheid. Aan de hand van een vergelijkend onderzoek naar individuele naturalisatieaanvragen in Antwerpen en Rotterdam, stelt dit artikel dat de hechte relatie tussen de natiestaat en de mechanismen van wettelijke in- en uitsluiting waarop die berust, moet worden gerelativeerd.
Spaces of pleasure tend to unite people and bridge sociocultural boundaries while involving exclusion mechanisms and tools for social control. Institutions of pleasure also contribute to the spatial configuration of cities. This article explores the role played by pleasure institutions in marking material and nonmaterial borders in turn-of-the-century Gothenburg. It examines how internal city borders, and, in particular, those between areas seen as “port districts” and those conceived as the “city centre,” were constructed, maintained, and given meaning through institutions of pleasure, and how these borders in turn shaped the city’s pleasure culture. Analyzing different social actors’ share in the social practices and discourses that constructed these borders, I argue that pleasure institutions played an important role in the reconfiguration of Gothenburg’s urban space in the course of the city’s tension-fraught entry into urban modernity.
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