Port Cities and Global Legacies Urban Identity, Waterfront Work, and Radicalism

This book advances the concept of 'global legacies' - enduring forms, processes, or ideas of the 'global' that shape urban identity and politics. Global legacies provide a key lens on the difficult pasts and uncertain futures of cities. In particular, port cities, with their distinctive global dynamics, long histories of casual labour, large migrant communities, and roles within international trade networks, exhibit fascinating global legacies.
Employing a rich methodological repertoire, Alice Mah combines approaches from critical political economy, global history and sociology, and ethnographic case study methods in this comparative study. The result is a careful examination of the contradictory legacies of empire, capitalism, casual labour, and radicalism in Liverpool, Marseille, and New Orleans. These major port cities faced painful processes of ruination followed by attempts at recovery in the recent past. This book reveals that while global legacies are fraught and contradictory, they also offer a framework of possibilities and resources for imagining alternative urban futures.

Alice Mah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place (2012), which won the 2013 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

1. Introduction
PART I: URBAN IDENTITY
2. Out of the Blue, Into the Black: Representing, Imagining, and Researching Port Cities
3. Reconstructing Port Identities: The Urban Politics of Waterfront Development
4. From Ports of Empire to Capitals of Culture: Museums of Slavery and Colonial History
PART II: WATERFRONT WORK
5. Intergenerational Lessons from the Liverpool Dockers' Strike: Rebuilding Solidarity in the Port
6. Precarious Reforms and the Legacy of Struggle: The Dockers of Marseilles-Fos
7. Ruination and Recovery: Keeping the Longshoremen's History in Post-Katrina New Orleans
PART III: RADICALISM
8. Radicalism on the Waterfront: Imagining Alternative Futures in Liverpool, Marseille, and New Orleans
9. Conclusion