Lives in Transit: Steamship Passages in the Late 19th and Early-20th Century World

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roland Wenzlhuemer
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 312104974

Lives in transit are a key feature of the 21st century world. Today, social orders are established and can flourish independently from territorial orders. Movement, transition and exchange form the frameworks within which contemporary societies, and groups in those societies, reinvent themselves. This project offers new historical context for such contemporary phenomena by examining past experiences of globalisation. It proposes that we focus on steamships as exemplary historical spaces of transit, and on the people within these spaces as the understudied protagonists of globalisation during the period in question. To study the environment of the steamship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is to place one of the symbols of the modern world under the magnifying glass. Analysing shipboard life reveals social orders in transit. Long-distance ship passengers found themselves in a phase of partial suspension, thrown into the midst of an artificial community of other travellers. In the absence of a familiar, land-based sociocultural framework, social relations needed to be re-established, re-enacted and often also adapted on board. The isolated and seemingly ephemeral phase of transit thus took on a formative character, becoming the scene of group- and identity-building processes. Such processes, moreover, were intimately connected to the periods before and after the journey. Suspended in transit, passengers reflected, rebuilt and redefined the past just as they also imagined and planned for the future. The project examines the space of the steamship as an extraordinary historical arena, in which crew and passengers alike had to make sense of their surroundings and of their own position therein. The project asks how historical actors on long-distance steamship passages negotiated their social positions during this phase of transit. It examines processes of identity- and community-building, as well as the particularities of social orders on ships. How did a sense of community emerge on the ship? How did 'passengers' reassure themselves of land-based markers such as social status and national identity vis-à-vis other seaborne groups and vis-à-vis the world outside the ship? What were the emotional, psychopathological and physiological consequences of being in transit? Where did the journey begin, and where did it end? The project's principal aim is to reconceive our understanding of global connections and of the historiographies they inspire - 'connected', 'entangled' and 'global' history. Using the steamship as an exemplar, the project takes transit to be both a phase and an epistemological paradigm. It combines social, cultural and digital history approaches to the subject matter in order to highlight the profound social, cultural and political ramifications of being in transit;ramifications that are relevant also to today's world. In so doing, we offer new ways of framing and narrating the discipline of global history itself.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Martin Dusinberre