Programme

A abertura dos portos brasileiros em 1808 tem profundo significado, real e simbólico. Marca a ruptura do sistema colonial que, durante três séculos, regera a vida do território dominado pela monarquia lusitana no continente americano. Dá início à transição política que culminaria, 14 anos após, com o nascimento de um novo Estado na América, o Império do Brasil. A passagem do sistema de portos fechados ao regime de portos abertos teve profundo impacto na trajetória econômica da ex-colônia, da mesma forma que repercutiu sobre a economia britânica, em processo acelerado de industrialização vivenciado numa conjuntura política internacional crítica, de conflito aberto pelo controle da hegemonia mundial travado com a arqui-rival França. Complementarmente, interferiu no ritmo de crescimento da economia industrial portuguesa e constituiu-se em elemento decisivo na asfixia da industrialização francesa. Em síntese, a íntegra do texto porá em evidência, pela primeira vez, a balança de comércio entre a Grã-Bretanha e o Brasil num momento crucial de suas trajetórias históricas, revelando valores e produtos prioritários em suas transações mercantis, produtos estratégicos, como o algodão, que alimentava a industrialização inglesa em momento de retração de seus fornecedores norte-americanos, viabiliza o boom da indústria têxtil francesa entre 1808 e 1811, ao mesmo tempo em que alça o Brasil à condição de ator de destaque no cenário histórico mundial.

These Canary ports: s cale of the Atlantic traffic in the “First Globalization”
Luis Cabrera Armas (ULL)
lcabrera@ull.es
Miguel Suárez Bosa (ULPGC)
msuarez@dch.ulpgc.es

In the 19th Century freedom of the seas went hand in hand with free-trade, a generalized concept that coincided with what is acknowledged to have been the “First Globalization”, or simply stated, a free circulation of economic factors. This process needs to be seen within the framework of the world economy in the 19th century, which, in its latter part culminated in colonial expansionism. Such a market was possible due to the convergence of diverse technological, economic and political factors. Among these factors we should also highlight free-trade as an ideology, as well as the success of the Gold Standard to facilitate monetary order, and also the revolution in transport, and capital exports, etc. However, in the real economy, this freedom was limited due to economic controls put in place by certain nations and company networks, in such a way that large shipping and coal-mining companies were controlling a large proportion of traffic through shipping routes and supply stations. The entailment of the canary ports with the international trade is inseparable of its history due to its strategic position in the Atlantic Ocean and the institutional regulation of the free commerce, confirmed in 19th century after the implantation of the free ports in 1852. All this confers to the Canary Islands at the time of steam navigation, unquestionable attractive as intermediary in the interchanges between Europe and other continents. This communication studies the commercial routes that had as node the Canary ports, routes that are, as well, indicators of the development and the expansion of industrial Capitalism from the end of 19th century to the present time. Subsequently will be analyzed the key shipping companies of this traffic and its alliances: the marine confederations. Finally, the role of the island ports as food supply stations is studied, doing special emphasis in the enterprise strategy regarding these provisions.

The aim of the following article is evaluate the real impact of the Shipping Conference concerted between Elder Dempster and Woermann Linie in West Africa in the beginning of Twentieth Century. We make efforts in the role played by the Canary Islands in this subject.
We will realise an exhaustive study of the significance and importance of the Shipping Conferences on development of International Trade, and the different roles played by the members of these Conferences. We will make comparison between the West African Shipping Conferences and others like North American Shipping Conferences or Baltic Shipping Conference for example. These aspects are explained too by the theory of interlocking connections and the agents who make relations between the colonies and the home country. In our work, we will invest the rivalries between United Kingdom and Germany in West Africa in the precedent years to First World War, with a clear and fundamental focus in the Canary Islands. In these Islands the effects of international context are basic for understand the development of his trade, economy and society. In this aspect, we will realise economic analysis where the results will reflect the subject we said before.
This article is supported by the Atlantic Studies Group (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University), who is characterised for his interdisciplinary studies and the intervention and collaboration of researchers and specialists from Brazil, Spain, United Kingdom, Venezuela and Cuba. In last instance, this work conform an important section of the Thesis Project directed by Dr. Miguel Suárez Bosa where is treated the relations between the Port of Las Palmas and Dakar in the XX Century, and it is supported by the Insular Government of Gran Canaria (Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria).

The interaction of infrastructure, multilateral trade and learning is explored to explain the patterns of shipping productivity growth in the 17th and 18th century

The paper examines the port of Salvador da Bahia as a node in shifting commodity networks. A detailed empirical tableau of Bahia’s external trade by origin and destination for the years 1845-1914 is presented and analyzed, thereby revealing the major shifts. Given this contextual map, I then analyze in greater depth three commodities passing through the port of Salvador which played critical roles during 1850-1914: leaf tobacco, codfish and sugar machinery. The effort is to overcome distanciation – both socially and spatially – between the consumer and the producers, unveiling the fetish (of disconnectedness) by tracing out the social relations involved ‘behind’ consumption. The cod fishers of Newfoundland knew not that their catch would eventually feed African slaves working in Bahia’s sugar plantations. The affluent German cigar-smokers had little idea that their cigars contained Bahian tobacco leaf grown, harvested and dried by impoverished ex-slave families. Each of these commodities connected the rural hinterlands of Bahia with the metropolitan cites of Europe. One commodity (cod fish) was a final consumption item, another was an imported intermediate good (sugar machinery), and the third was a primary product export (leaf tobacco).

This paper examines the ways in which the economic development of French Indochina, which included the modernisation of port cities such as Haiphong, served to increase human trafficking from Vietnam to China during the period of French colonial rule in Indochina.

The paper deals with the first results of a research about the importation and commerce of fossil coal in Italy during the XIXth and early XXth century. The increasing supply of coal was a very important circumstance in Italian economic history. In fact, the possibility of using a new source of energy, cheaper and more effective than traditional ones, was an essential precondition for the industrialization of the country. The fossil coal arrived above all through the harbour of Genoa. This started off many transformations which changed the urban and social aspect of the city. Along with a drastic modernization of the harbour, and the development of communications, as roads and railroads, for transporting the goods in direction of the factories in Milan and Turin, the birth of a new class of workers, specialized in handling of coal, and the growth of the local and national entrepreneurship, became key elements of such a transformation.

European colonialism facilitated population migrations across vast distances, spurring the growth of concentrations of middlemen far removed from their regions of origin. Late 19th-century West African port cities received several waves of Levantine migrants beginning in the 1880s. These groups, dominated by the Lebanese, played critical roles as intermediaries in the late 19th- and early 20th-century 'commercial pyramid' of West Africa, selling European manufactures (beginning with textiles and beads) to African consumers, and thereby helping spread the monetized economy. In exchange, Levantine traders purchased African cash crops, including palm kernels and cocoa, which they 'bulked-up' and sold on to European firms for export. This paper will investigate the roles played by Levantine middlemen in the expansion of colonial port-city trade in West Africa, which helped develop imperial commodity networks linked to the region on an unprecedented scale. It will also demonstrate that Levantine middlemen served as active agents in the spread of the port-city 'beachhead' of the colonial economy, helping diffuse the monetized economy upriver, and later, via road and train networks into the interior. It was both the transnational and hybridized quality of West African colonial entrepôts, and their increasing links with metropolitan ports, that allowed Levantine traders to settle, flourish, and participate in the expansion of the colonial economy. This paper will analyze these linkages and processes, while also speaking to wider issues related to the formation of transnational diasporic identities based in port cities, and the transmission of business knowledge through the family. It will underscore a highly significant point of articulation between facilitated migration and the expansion in scale and complexity of imperial trade.

The challenges that the increasing globalization of the world economy brought about during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries opened up new economic opportunities for certain areas, especially those with access to new trade routes by sea. Therefore, ports were since then privileged places that channelled the gradual process of integration of markets.
During this long period, ports of the most developed nations underwent an outstanding growth, thanks to the factors upon which this first wave of market integration was built, which allowed the development of scale economies that also irradiated their impact on the surrounding territories. In other words, they served as transmission belt of the mechanisms of wealth generation, as they were vehicles for the exchange of goods between land and sea transport systems.
The response in the peripheral European countries like Spain, was somewhat less robust. The strengthening of the Spanish port system was based on a short number of leading ports, located naturally in those regions endowed with comparative advantages for exportation, and above all for the importation from abroad. This took place within a general context of high tariff protection, which reinforced the supplementary role of coastal shipping. The aim of the paper is to reflect on the basis of the consolidation of the Spanish port system, linking the relative success or ‘failure’ of each port with the endogenous dynamics of development of the regions or areas where they settled in. And then to analyze more deeply a case study, a port that was representative of the medium-sized maritime cities, which formed the cement that compacted the – unbalanced – national port structure.
Spain stands out for its considerable coastal perimeter. Despite this, historically, the volume of maritime traffic has not achieved the levels that one would expect, and it was not until the twentieth century when there was a significant growth of the trade in its ports. For that reason, the period that was chosen seems relevant as it coincides, on the one hand, with the advent of several different junctures that had a profound impact on international shipping, but above all because it is consistent with the hypothesis of an explosion of the urban phenomenon in the country, mainly during the 1920s and the 1950s.

This study focuses on the importance of the demand for Brazilian products by the Spanish market. From the treatment of quantitative data concerning Portuguese exports to Spain from 1796 to 1831, it is possible to highlight the role of Portugal as a commercial platform between Brazil and Spain. The two main Brazilian products exported to the Spanish market were tannery products and cotton.
The period when Portuguese exports to Spain reached the highest annual average was 1814-1820 and, at that time the Spanish Market was Portugal’s third largest client. Moreover, despite the opening up of Brazilian ports to the whole world on January 28th, 1808, it is precisely in this period that the Spanish demand for Brazilian products was intensified, Portugal being used as channel for indirect commerce of Brazilian leather and cotton to Spain.
The occasional Spanish demand for Brazilian sugar, which represented a significant quota of that market by the end of 18th century, is also analyzed.

Keywords: Spanish demand, Brazil, cotton, tannery products, sugar

The first transformation of world trade was the opening up of the Atlantic during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a trade in which Cork came to play a major role. Its traditional markets were expanded to include the Americas and the West Indies. During the seventeenth century it enjoyed a provisions trade unrivalled in the Atlantic world. Despite a reversal of fortunes at the port after 1815, its involvement in early capitalism enabled it to partake in a trade-based international economy throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

At the dawn of Imperialism, Cork’s global position was reawakened. There was a shift in its trade roots, which was simultaneously a catalyst and outgrowth of emigration. The migration of human cargo and transferral of local commodities to global markets were inextricably bound. In the latter decades of the century, trade and emigration developed in isolation.

From the seventeenth century, Cork’s role in British overseas expansion was vital. The port provided a gateway for a colonising population and a means by which products could reach a global market. This paper will address the role Cork played in mediating local goods to North America, the West Indies and Atlantic Europe from 1850. The interchange of agricultural products from Munster, raw material from Canada and foodstuffs from the Caribbean will be considered. The physical development of the port, to facilitate the world’s largest vessels and become an open trans-shipment site will be discussed.

This article relates to the major initiatives of the urban reform project occurred in the city of Vitória at the beginning of the 20th century, considering the idea that the public power ha regarding the urban action on the city combining sanitation, traffic, and urban remodeling. The intention of attributing to Vitória a modern character according to the progress ideals and on behalf of the civilization development will be noticed in the urban reforms that happened in the city, which were supported by the speeches sanitarians/hygienists that will give meaning to these reforms. In this context a plan was designed in three dimensions: the structure outworks and the rigging of the port, the city's sanitation, and urban reform. As in other port cities in Brazil that at the end of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century received notable influences of European urban modernization, Vitória sought to align its progressive feats to the new ideas of hygiene/modernization, taking also the ownership of European influences to guide its project of recast urban, prioritizing the reforms of the Port as the largest agent on the state progress and modernization of the city.

This paper presents a case study of soy beans -- its production, trade, and consumption in China and Germany -- and how its rising demand contributed to the development of the Siberian port city Vladivostock. My paper has three parts: first, I examine the family dynamics and struggles within Rickmers Rheederei, a Hanseatic shipping firm, and its competition with other shipping lines for the East Asian market, in particular Norddeutscher Lloyd. The second part examines the route taken by Rickmers, asking why the Russian port Vladivostock was favored over Chinese treaty-ports. Finally, my paper delves into the fate of soybean shipments upon their arrival in Hamburg: the processing and eventual consumption of soy products in Germany.
Unlike its larger competitors, Rickmers was actively run by a single family and primarily interested in transport between Asia and Germany. Focusing on Rickmers offers a unique opportunity to explore the struggles of a Hanseatic family business both internally between the generations, and externally in its competition with other shipping companies, against the backdrop of Japanese and Russian imperial ambitions in northeastern China and Siberia, where the soy originated, and the rapid growth of Vladivostock, from where the soy was shipped. By following the soybean trail and probing into its various uses, my paper connects contemporary nutritional developments and practices in Germany together with the transnational trade in East Asia.