Steamboat Modernity

Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860

Author: Constantin Ardeleanu

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Description

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe’s peripheries.

Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. The book offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising. Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization.

Critic Reviews

"Constantin Ardeleanu's fascinating book takes the reader on an excursion to the past of the Middle and Lower Danube over three vital decades, when iron and steam looked set to transfigure the river, its shores and hinterlands, and even the private worlds of those who traveled on it. Expertly researched and clearly narrated, Steamboat Modernity is not just a model cultural history of tourism, transport and technology, but also offers new ways of thinking about the region's social and geopolitical transformation at the dawn of the modern age."--Alex Drace-Francis
"Steamboat Modernity provides a comprehensive account of the multilayered transformation that took place on the Danube River and in the two adjacent territories of Moldavia and Wallachia during the 19th century. Besides enabling a flourishing grain trade and a reliable passenger traffic, steam technology also changed sociability, imaginaries and even landscape along this important European transportation route connecting the East with the West. Beautifully written and carefully crafted, the book is an important contribution to the growing literature on global travel experiences and mobilities that aided the circulation of ideas and concepts across imperial spaces."--Luminita Gatejel

About the Author

Constantin Ardeleanu is a senior researcher at the Institute of South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy and at the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest.