EAUH Antwerp Conference (15th Conference of the European Association of Urban History) is scheduled for 31 August – 3 September 2022. One session during the conference is “Institutional Inequality? Access to Colonial Institutions in Early Modern Port Cities.”

Early modern port cities across the globe had to deal with permanent colonization from the outside. Historians have shown that some of these cities were deliberate attempts to re-create the institutional framework of the metropole on other continents, while other literature has foregrounded that European imperial powers used the existing colonial contexts to construct new utopian societies. However, ultimately all of them were somehow forced to adapt their original set-up to local social circumstances in overseas port cities. This often resulted in highly glocalized colonial institutions, serving clients all across the social, religious, and ethnic spectrum.

This session aims to study the effects of social and cultural inequality on institutional inequality in global port cities. What role did wealth, religion, ethnicity, or status play in access to colonial institutions? A conscious trans-imperial approach allows us to gauge the specificity of various local settings with which European colonizers had to cope in embedding their institutions in local urban settings. However, institutional inequality did not only exist between and within empires, but institutional rules could also vary within port cities, with different rules for different social groups.

For more information about the seminar, please contact Archa Neelakandan Girija ([email protected]).