International Sailortown

The cross-port heritage study of “sailortown,” the dockside districts of boarding houses, taverns, missions, chandlers, and brothels that served seafarers in 19th and early 20th-century ports such as Liverpool, London’s Ratcliffe Highway, Hamburg’s St Pauli, and New York’s waterfront. The field documents the shared social world of transient crews ashore, the crimping trade that supplied ships with men, and the seamen’s mission movement. It treats these districts as a connected international culture rather than isolated local slums, drawing on port records, mission archives, and oral history.