This chapter traces the transformation of some of Gothenburg’s theatres from private enterprises into municipality- and state-run affairs, highlighting the often-conflictual negotiation processes inherent to the making of welfare cities. The making of some of Gothenburg’s theatres into public institutions reveals the different – and sometimes conflicting – claims of turn-of-the-century urban welfarism: public funding was to guarantee that ‘good’ theatre became an economically affordable and thereby a socially integrating institution while at the same time conforming to a certain moral and artistic standard. The chapter uncovers the different forms of urban actorship involved in transforming theatre into a public infrastructure and draws the entanglements between private initiatives, municipal decision-making, state support and the – relatively weak – involvement of Gothenburg’s popular movements. By un-packing the entangled components of emerging urban welfarism, the chapter unravels the welfare city as having its origin and catalyst not only in considerations of ‘the common good’ but just as much in private interests.

In the late nineteenth century, with the expansion of their harbours and the growth of transatlantic mobility, the port cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam became home to economically important and large migrant communities. In a context marked by the often-claimed rise of the nation state, when national legislation concerning nationality and citizenship was shifting, local authorities and citizens played an important but still underestimated role when it came to enforcing the naturalisation of foreign nationals. Applications for naturalisation in both Antwerp and Rotterdam were firmly rooted in the local context, and economic performance was key to the police commissar’s support of an applicant’s case towards the national authorities. By comparatively analysing individual applications for naturalisation in Antwerp and Rotterdam, this paper argues that the close relationship between the nation-state and the mechanisms of legal inclusion and exclusion on which it rested, has to be relativised.

This article addresses the intertwined development of the port cities of Rotterdam and Antwerp into border zones that took place with the upswing of steam navigation in the upcoming age of high mobility. It focuses on administrative practice, namely local authorities' approaches to identifying and registering mobile people, to shed new light on the often-presumed shift in migration control in this period. Scrutiny of the paperwork used and produced by local authorities tasked with migration control suggests that administrative practice does not fit into coherent narratives of high modernity characterised by the increasing relevance of nationality, border control management, and a growing impact of the nation-state. Instead, this era is characterised by the layering of control practices: Resilient practices-some dating back to pre-modern times, some lacking coherence; the practices of individual police agents; and national policies.