Table Of ContentGATEWAYS OF ASIA
GATEWAYS OF ASIA
Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–20th Centuries
edited by
Frank Broeze
in association with the
Asian Studies Association of Australia
(Comparative Asian Studies Series, vol. 2)
First published in 1997 by
Kegan Paul International
This edition first published in 2010 by
Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 10: 0-7103-0554-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0554-1 (hbk)
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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the
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CONTENTS
Introduction Brides of the Sea Revisited
Frank Broeze
1 Aden in Pre-Turkish Times (1232–1538):
The Arabian Entrepot of the Western Asian Seas
Hassan Saleh Shihab
2 Masulipatnam Revisited, 1550–1750:
A Survey and Some Speculations
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
3 Banten around the Turn of the Sixteenth Century:
Trade and Society in an Indonesian Port City
Christopher Wake
4 Penang 1786–1832:
A Promise Unfulfilled
Kenneth McPherson
5 Bombay and the Famine of 1803–6:
The Food Supply and Public Order of a Colonial Port City
Mariam Dossal
6 Kuwait Before Oil:
The Dynamics and Morphology of an Arab Port City
Frank Broeze
7 Colombo and the Re-Making of Ceylon:
A Prototype of Colonial Asian Port Cities
Rhoads Murphey
8 Bangkok in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries:
The Dynamics and Limits of Port Primacy
Malcolm Falkus
9 Kobe and Niigata:
Situation and Site in the Development of Two Japanese Port Cities
Takeshi Yamasaki, Kanae Tanigawa and Gayl D. Ness
10 Vladivostok:
‘City and Ocean’ in Russia’s Far East
Robert Valliant
11 Alleppey:
From a Port without a City to a City without a Port
Hans Schenk
12 ASEAN Ports since 1945:
Maritime Change and Port Rivalry
Keith Trace
13 Japan’s Seaports and regional developments during the Era of High-
Speed Growth, 1960–75
Peter Rimmer with Toru Taniuchi
INTRODUCTION
BRIDES OF THE SEA REVISITED
Frank Broeze
Department of History
University of Western Australia
In 1870 the foreign residents mostly merchants and shipping agents of Yokohama
desired to improve the appearance of their small enclave through the creation of a
park.1 In the first instance, their request to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs led
to a ludicrous squabble between the British, who wanted to see a cricket ground
included in the park, and the Americans, who did not. But soon afterwards, and far
more importantly, the affair induced the Meiji government to adopt western-style city
planning and to expropriate religious and state grounds throughout Japan in order to
transform them into public parks for the recreation of all Japanese citizens. Although
less profound perhaps than many other changes in rapidly modernizing Japan, this
radical social measure was a telling example of the dynamic influence of Yokohama,
the western ‘spearhead’ which was Meiji Japan’s first modern port city.2
Yet, only a few years later, the foreigners were directly challenged by the rise at
Tokyo (the former Edo) of the Mitsubishi Steamship Company which, after
amalgamation with the Kyodo Unyu Kaisha, in 1885 became the Nippon Yusen Kaisha.
Very soon the NYK was a vital element in the set of maritime power instruments with
which Japan delineated its local sphere of interest3 and, after the victories over China
and Russia, established itself as the indisputably strongest power in East Asia. By this
stage the leisure time preferences of Britain and America had become totally irrelevant
to Japanese policy making and planning.
The amazing capacity of Japan to pull up itself by its own economic and
technological bootstraps still offers ample material for a great variety of comparative
studies with China. Central in Japan’s policy of modernization stood from the
beginning the industrialization of its port districts and the creation of additional port
zones for that purpose. As Rimmer shows in his chapter, this pattern of growth became
even more pronounced during the period of rapid growth after 1960. Significantly, after
about a century of political fluctuations and spasmodic economic development focusing
on Shanghai and to a lesser extent Canton (Guangzhou),4 the current leaders of China
from the late 1970s assigned a systematic and ‘catalytic’ role to its port cities “in the
nation’s … drive toward modernization and economic development through the
adoption of the open policy.”5 But this open door, by contrast to that of the turn of the
past century, was to be firmly under Chinese control.
This Janus-like, mediating and dynamic role of port cities has been a major element
in the thrust of modern port city literature since Murphey and Price published their
seminal articles on Asia and colonial America6 which triggered off a global diffusion of
port city studies. In the process a fertile interaction between history and other
disciplines, above all geography, economics and town planning (no Australian
equivalent exists for the comprehensive American concept ‘urbanism’) resulted in a
growing number of collaborative volumes.7 Indicative of the broad front, multi-
disciplinary approach and challenging agenda of this wave of port town and port city
studies is the collective and diverse nature of the themes and authorship of each of
these works. That very diversity of disciplines, nationalities and perspectives is also one
of the main pillars supporting Gateways of Asia. Eight historians are joined by almost
as many geographers, planners and economists. Taking an alternative perspective, in
the company of six Australians stand one Yemeni, two Indians, three Japanese, three
Americans and one European.
It is not necessary here to repeat or summarize the introduction and first chapter of
Brides of the Sea for a definition of the port city concept and its heuristic values. But the
publication of this volume, in many ways a sequel to that work, does provide the
opportunity of clarifying a few points and elaborating on some issues raised after its
publication. A number of reviewers of Brides, for example, found the port city concept
nothing more than a common-sense description, devoid of any particular explanatory
usefulness and not capable of creating or sustaining a conceptual framework to bring
together the empirical studies contained in the volume.8 That it is the port which makes
the port city different from other cities is, in itself, of course no more than a statement
of fact but these reviewers have missed the point that the explicit and conscious use of
the term ‘port city’ entails far more than that. It specifically means that the economic,
social, political and cultural life of that city is also predominantly determined by and
has to be analysed in the light of that port function. It is that complex and all-
embracing superstructure which creates both the challenge and the possibility to assess
just how the port city’s functional difference affects its character and identity and how
it interacts with its hinterland. It is perfectly possible that in an empirical study the
fundamental concept which relates, for example, port function to interethnic social and
cultural relations can appear to have shifted to the background;9 it has, nevertheless,
lost nothing of its explanatory and integratory potency. The same applies, conversely,
in studies of rival financial networks in western India based on, for example, Broach
and Bombay.10
None of this should be read to mean that the port is the only dynamic sector in the
port city or that it can be seen in total isolation from its immediate environment.11 The
well-documented presence of Chinese entrepreneurs and labourers in Shanghai12 or a
host of ethnic groups from western India in Bombay13 – to use only two examples
from Murphey’s many modernizing enclaves – demonstrate the latter interrelationship
eloquently. A particularly poignant role was played by Kuwait’s largely Persian
waterside workers who saved the port city state in 1920 from the attacking Sa’udis. In
earlier periods the strong-points of the Estado da India, similarly, were planted into a
social environment which continuously interacted with the society and culture of the
Europeans within the factory or city walls. Indeed, as McPherson has demonstrated
elsewhere,14 the number of pure Portuguese rapidly diminished and a human
amalgama developed which in many ways was comparable to that of the burghers of
Colombo or ‘Eurasiates’ of Batavia.
Nevertheless, it is above all the active intertwining of all forces from foreland and
hinterland through the physical and mediating function of the port which explains the
extent, pace and manner of each port city’s specific development. Explicitly or
implicitly, with all the fuzziness around the edges and all the dilemmas that no precise
definition or conceptualization can ever avoid, there is a clearly distinct semi-maritime
semi-terrestrial urban structure on the physical border between land and sea. As such,
this concept of the port city can surely be used as a heuristic tool, both geographically
and historically, for an analysis of its historical development. A specific complication,
perhaps downplayed too much in Brides, is the multi-functionality of most port cities.
This element was particularly highlighted in most contributions to Atlantic Port Cities
where trade was occasionally seriously rivalled by defence and administration as the
prime dynamic urban sector. In this volume, too, there is a plethora of case studies
analysing the intimate connections between the economic base of the port city – on
both the macro- and micro-economic levels – its morphology, and its political, social,
and cultural life – ranging in scope from Dossal’s cameo on the food supply of Bombay
to Falkus’ Bangkok and the two collaborative chapters on Japan.
In view of this multi-functionality and the tendency of many port cities to develop
over time into general cities there can, as one reviewer noted,15 easily be disagreements
or uncertainties about the definition of the concept. Some may take the purely
contemporaneous view that multi-function is multi-function, whatever its origins;
others may apply historical criteria and still see the port city in existence when a
significant number of non-maritime functions have over time directly been derived
from the port. It will never be possible to solve such definitional differences but they do
not fundamentally affect the usefulness of the concept or its applicability. Moreover,
they cannot undo that cooperation between historians and ‘urbanists’ which now has
gone “a long way toward integrating port history with urban history.”16
Such a truly multi-disciplinary analytical framework makes the port city concept
eminently suitable as a vehicle for both comparative studies and syntheses. The
comparative analysis of Kobe and Niigata by the Japanese-American troika Yamasaki,
Tanigawa and Ness may in this respect be regarded as paradigmatic for Gateways of
Asia as a whole. Although most other chapters focus on a single port city, comparisons
are implicit in many of these ‘biographical’ studies and collectively they are building
stones of an overall history of Asian – and, ultimately, world – port cities which
remains to be written. That such a history is still far off, as so many pieces of the jig-
saw puzzle have as yet not been sketched, does not make any difference to the
principle.
A vital element in the mixing of disciplines, which is often overlooked, is the need
to integrate the human dimension. History, however much it may have become
structural and quantitative, must also be human. The human dimension can have many
faces, as many indeed as there are people. The history of maritime labour and other
workers is still in its infancy and so is that of the women who inhabited port cities and
precincts.17 Business leaders have received more attention, but too often still in isolation
from the life of the port cities in which they operated. Price noted the need to focus
more attention on the trading firms of the port cities in order to understand the growth
of those cities. Checkland, in a more general vein, observed that ‘business history and
urban history have largely failed to come together. The entrepreneurs who provided
the economic base for the city, as well as largely determining its morphology (being
the dominant claimants for sites), have received little attention. Capital formation,
having been seen largely in sectoral terms, has been very little approached in terms of
urban units.’18 One of the purposes of Gateways of Asia is specifically to take up the
implicit challenge from these two Chesapeake- and Clydeside historians. Businessmen
are found in profusion through the book, as much almost as the sources allowed it.
They are the backbone of cities as diverse as Masulipatnam, Banten, Kuwait, Bangkok
and pre-Bolshevik Vladivostok.
Many scholars, however, have insisted that the essence of city life is not so much
economic but psychological and existential, pivoting around the ‘image of the city’ and
the ‘city experience’.19 Both themes have, in fact, been one of the strong points of
Indian port city research, exemplified by scholars such as Ashin Das Gupta20 and, in this
volume, Subrahmanyam. Das Gupta’s Surat is a city full of merchants and shipowners
and his ‘Maritime City’ is not static but continuously responding to new situations and
circumstances. And, as he notes, it is only the life-experiences of Surat’s individuals
which can explain the responses of the city to its constantly changing environment. In
other words, the situation does not become ‘real … if we do not know what it felt like
for human beings who were in it.’21 And, as the chapter on Kuwait suggests, what it
smelled like!
