Port Cities and Global Legacies2014

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.--Provided by publisher.