The historiography of German and American Rust Belt cities preponderantly focuses on the processes of (de-)industrialization as the causalities of their (de-)urbanization. Infrastructural networks and the cities’ connections to waterways and supply routes deserve more attention. Guided by a scripture of expansion – an indisputable, authoritative narrative –, commerce and trade incubated these cities’ consolidations of geo-political and economic power in the 18th and 19th centuries. As inland harbor cities they became nuclei for commercial and nation-state empires, for formal and informal control. Why should the historiography of industrial cities essentially also tell a story of unrelenting expansionism at the costs of nature and native peoples? How do geo-political, trading, industrial, and urban expansionisms interlink throughout the past three centuries and set a historic base logic of urban development that has entailed and steadied a host of inequalities in favor of economic and industrial power? What otherwise suppressed instances of resistance, loss, and failure need pointing out to formulate a richer historiography of cities that usually find their historic characterization through a truncated narrative of industrial rise, decline, and postindustrial reinvention?