The Global History of the Free Port

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article sketches a new, integrated history of the free port from the late sixteenth to the mid twentieth century. It lays out the historiographical problems associated with the free port, ranging from how to conceptualise the form and function of the institution and the uses to which it has been put, to situating its place within liberal political economy. The starting point for making sense of the free port is to trace the history of its paradigmatic cases, studying not only key models such as Livorno, Hamburg, or Singapore; but also how contemporaries discussed, appropriated, and adapted them. It then turns to do just that, reconstructing the defining moments in the history of the free port: from the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century; Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; East Asia during the nineteenth century; and the entire globe in the twentieth century, when the free port was increasingly subsumed by a host of other spatial arrangements, such as the special economic zone. The conclusion considers what the free port indicates about the history of global capitalism and its relationship to European history and imperialism.