Technology and Culture

In August 1901 a delegation of the Verein deutscher Handelsmüller, an association of German grain mill owners, visited Rotterdam, the Dutch seaport that handled the largest share of continental Europe's grain imports, to promote the use of floating pneumatic grain elevators.¹ The delegates stressed [End Page 51] the elevators' important advantages: unloading a ship by vacuuming the grain out of its hold was several times faster than unloading by hand, and pneumatic elevators also incorporated automatic weighing and cleaning functions. But the mill owners met with a lukewarm response; the traders considered the speed of the existing system high enough. A committee of the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce said that the traders would much rather take their time in receiving grain from the seagoing vessels, and that "the forwarding trade does not desire a quicker dispatch either."² Only one of the many middlemen in the Rotterdam grain business, J. C. Smalt, perceived a future for pneumatic unloading, and he would become the moving spirit behind the introduction of the new elevators into the port.

In April 1904 Smalt founded a company that ordered two elevators from Germany, the first of which went into operation in August 1905. Unfortunately, its built-in scale malfunctioned, which created a credibility problem. Smalt returned the elevators to the factory and asked that the automatic scales be replaced with manually operated equipment. In the meantime, the workers who weighed the grain, whose jobs were endangered by this new development, organized and went on strike. Because the German grain importers were largely dependent on the port of Rotterdam, they settled with the strikers and promised not to receive grain from the elevators. After more than a year and a half of indecision, Smalt's company put the two elevators into operation again in March 1907. This time the dockworkers began a guerrilla war against the elevators that culminated in such violence against strikebreakers that in July 1907 the Dutch army had to restore order. Following that episode, the traders, ship agents, and stevedore firms joined forces against the workers, and within a couple of years they had managed to introduce the grain elevators in Rotterdam on a massive scale. In 1913 a fleet of floating pneumatic elevators unloaded 96 percent of the grain in Rotterdam.³ The elevators used in Rotterdam became the standard for continental European ports, although not all of them—Rotterdam's main competitor, Antwerp, was the most important exception—mechanized as rapidly. A new technological regime, as we will call it in this article, had emerged through a process of radical innovation.⁴ [End Page 52]

In this article we will set out to explain this remarkably quick and complete mechanization process in the port of Rotterdam. Why did it happen when it did? Rotterdam had become the most important grain port in continental Europe without any significant technological innovations in cargo handling, and it appears that when pneumatic elevators were introduced there ships carrying grain could still have been unloaded manually without major problems.

Because of the drama involved—the fierce resistance, the swift and radical transformation of the handling regime—this is a fascinating story in itself. The port of Rotterdam is a rich research site for bringing together labor and entrepreneurial perspectives. Moreover, port technologies are crucially important for any transport history and in a broader sense for any history of regional and world markets. Ports are local spaces where various streams of people and goods come together, needing to be coordinated and linked to each other. Global markets are coproduced and materialized in local harbor layouts, cranes, and other cargo-handling equipment. Yet the main reason to tell this story is methodological. This revealing case study will demonstrate how to combine macro-, meso-, and microlevel developments into one multilevel model, and we will argue that...