In the nineteenth century, steam globalization drove the rapid growth of port cities as cosmopolitan hubs connecting distant productive “hinterlands” to world markets. At the same time, this connectivity heightened security concerns of imperial states. As circuits of transnational mobility and exchange, ports were particularly susceptible to urban unrest, political radicalization, and mutiny. In wartime, ports emerged as crucial nodes of military logistics and therefore as primary targets of naval attack and blockade.
Recent scholarship has challenged approaches to maritime globalization that privilege connectivity and mobility. Jeremy Adelman and Valeska Huber have drawn attention to the limits, closures, and processes of disintegration that accompanied globalization. Nicholas Mulder’s work on economic warfare and Jamie Martin’s on international economic governance have shown how interdependence could become an instrument of coercion and control. Building on those insights, this workshop examines ports not primarily as cosmopolitan hubs of exchange, but as sites where connectivity could be mobilized, constrained, and weaponized. It asks how the dense concentration of commerce, transport networks, diverse populations, and ideas made port cities especially vulnerable to the pressures of war and revolution.
We welcome contributions from historians working on various aspects of the prolonged crisis of the Russian Empire, from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 through the First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and the ensuing civil wars to the consolidation of Soviet rule in the mid-1920s. The workshop takes a broad geographical approach, encompassing ports across the Russian Empire and its successor states, from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Caspian and the Pacific, without being strictly limited to these maritime regions. It also includes foreign ports that played important roles in Russian imperial and Soviet commerce, military logistics, and migration (e.g., Istanbul, Port Said, and Shanghai). This broad geographical scope reflects both the transnational entanglements of the Russian Empire and its successor states and our interest in comparative perspectives on maritime (dis)connection. We therefore also welcome contributions on other imperial contexts, including the Ottoman, Habsburg, German, Japanese, British, and French empires, that engage with the workshop’s central questions about the disruption and reconfiguration of maritime connections during war and revolution. We are particularly interested in papers addressing the following themes:
- Wartime mobilization of commercial infrastructure;
- War nationalism: enemy alien regimes, ethnic violence and expropriation;
- Economic warfare: blockades and boycotts;
- Contraband and smuggling;
- Emergency rule: military occupation, policing and surveillance;
- Food, fuel and supply crises in port cities;
- Public health, epidemics and sanitary control
- Displacement and migration: Refugees, POWs and civilian internees;
Submission Deadline: 6 November 2026
Notification of acceptance: 30 November 2026
Please send your proposal as a single PDF file, including your name, affiliation, presentation title, abstract (300 words max.), and a short CV (2 pages max) to info(at)mws-georgia.org with [Maritime (dis)connect] in the subject line.