Seminar meeting by Constantin Ardeleanu, 20-12-2021
The seminar meeting will be presented on Monday 20 December 2021, at 16:00 (Greece time) by Constantin Ardeleanu, The Lower Danube University of Galați/ New Europe College, Bucharest, on the topic "Steamships, the transportation revolution and sociality along the Danube and in the Black Sea (1830 – 1860)".
Abstract
The advent of steamships on the world's rivers and seas revolutionized economic, political, and cultural realities wherever they started plying. Steamships served as agents of modernization that galvanized regional and global mobility with their ability to convey passengers and cargo relatively inexpensively, rapidly, and safely. This presentation aims to turn steamships into arenas of global history and explore the social dimension of cruising by looking at the sociality engendered by the coming of the transportation revolution to the Danube and in the Black Sea. While gliding along the Danube, a politically disputed borderland that separated - and connected - the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, steamships themselves became busy platform where voyagers from all corners of the globe engaged in various social exchanges.