Contenu du sommaire : Identités portuaires. De la tempérance à la pair-aidance.

This paper examines how Barcelona, despite its coastal location, failed to develop a strong urban identity closely tied to the sea in the 19th century. The port gradually became an importer of coal and other industrial inputs rather than the central axis of an integrated economy. Central government trade policies often conflicted with local economic interests, further hindering development. Investment in port infrastructure was mostly extractive, relying heavily on public funds without yielding proportional returns. At the same time, as the city expanded inland, its economic development increasingly turned away from the sea. The influence of maritime actors, both the elite and the workforce, diminished in social and political life, gradually contributing to the physical and cultural separation between the city and its port.

The article explores the social characteristics of South Shields and the interactions of inhabitants to illustrate how political, maritime, and urban changes reshaped its community between 1914 and 1922. Drawing on testimonies detailed in archival records and extensive newspaper reports, the article contributes to the discussion about workers' intellectual engagement regarding solidarity, patriotism, internationalism, imperialism and racial issues. In doing so, the article sheds light on the diverse identities of the port town's working-class, workers' spatial practices, as well as their ideological drifts and conversions.

To write about Calcutta as a port city is to first shift attention away from the concerns of the middle class Bengali-speaking elite, also known as the Bhadraloks, that has dominated the history writing of the region. For the Bhadraloks, ponds, boats and rivers loomed large, whereas the sea, ships and sailors were entirely neglected, which perhaps has something to do with their marginalisation in the shaping and shares of imperial trade. Situated adjacent to some of the city's main landmarks, the dock neighbourhoods have remained beyond the pale up until today; these seedier neighbourhoods, predominantly housing labouring and migrant populations, have attracted scant scholarly attention. This paper is an exercise in excavating the history of a subterranean world, which somewhat emerges in intelligence, police reports and oral history accounts, and which also impacted the larger social and political developments. It brings into focus a different set of themes: crime and punishment, migration, religion and mobility, and subaltern militancy and labour policy. This swirling, volatile world saw crime, labour policy and anticolonialism interact with one another to shape the trajectories of the urban history of Calcutta.

Since the 19th century, Marseille has been associated with a range of narratives that have shaped powerful imaginaries and been embedded in historiographical traditions. The “Gateway to the Orient”, the “Capital of the French Colonial Empire”, the “Cosmopolitan City” and the “Euro-Mediterranean Metropolis” are just some of the expressions loaded with contradictory and evolving identities that constantly refer to the city's port trajectory. The real common denominator of these discourses is the port itself, presented in linear terms of “rise/prosperity/decline” and through the prism of the iconic trades of maritime life. Based on a review of the scientific literature and on recent research projects in economic and social history, this article looks beyond these narratives, not to make a clean sweep of them, but to make their reading more complex and to add nuance to their significance.

Many studies have examined the transformations of port spaces since the 1970s, but few have focused on the subsequent impact on the work of those who use these infrastructures: sailors and shippers. This article aims to highlight how these developments have modified the work of sailors, as well as their relationship to ports and port workers. Stopovers are increasingly reduced to commercial time governed by just-in-time logistics practices, where the intensification of work has made shore leave almost non-existent. However, a port call is still a space and a time for exchanges and negotiations between the various professionals who work in ports. These activities are now carried out in a closed maritime space that excludes outsiders, but includes all the interactions that these commercial operations give rise to.

This article looks at the creation of the Société de sobriété d'Amiens in 1835 by Henry Philippe Auguste Dutrône (1796-1866), a prominent philanthropist and Royal Councillor at the Court of Amiens. The Société de Sobriété was part of the temperance society movement, which originated in the United States before gradually spreading to Europe in the 1830s. While historians have placed a great deal of emphasis on the anti-alcohol policies implemented in France after the Paris Commune, they have sometimes neglected the first half of the 19th century. This example shows that the elites of the post-revolutionary monarchies did not ignore the problem of drunkenness, which was perceived as a scourge that mainly affected the working class. Dutrône's dedication to this cause was not entirely disinterested, as he was in search of recognition, both social and political, as a competent member of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. This article endeavours to show that philanthropic networks played a major role in the development of public health in France, alongside the health professions, politicians and other experts.

This article examines the creation and development of the Vie Libre movement of recovered alcoholics, from its founding in 1953 to the early 1980s. Using unpublished archives and the movement's publications, it shows that the development of Vie Libre was inextricably linked to the emergence of a new therapeutic approach to alcoholism, reclaimed by former alcoholics. It then examines the way in which integration into the group and activism were seen as ways of working towards the cure and social advancement of alcoholics. Finally, it shows that Vie Libre, a working-class and politicised movement, was a unique attempt to give former drinkers an existence as a social group and an active political force. This article thus seeks to contribute to the history of both the French anti-alcohol movement and the mobilisation of patients.