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“Where was the nineteenth century?” asks Jürgen Osterhammel in his magnum opus, The Transformation of the World. It was to be found, he says, in the European “discoveries” of new lands, in the naming of the world, in the “mental maps” of how the world’s regions were imagined to be interconnected, and in the relationship between the land and the sea. In the articles that make up this special issue, we argue that the critical sites of the nineteenth century, broadly defined, were the phenomena that connected these discoveries, mental maps, world regions, and the land and the sea: ships.
Ocean-crossing ships are at once obvious yet obscure candidates for the title of quintessential nineteenth-century lieux d’histoire. Their significance is obvious in the sense that they played such a fundamental role in the geopolitical transformation of the world and in its “shrinking” or its so-called “great acceleration”. Ships are of obvious historical importance, too, because they were always more than just material objects, especially when (again in the age of steam) their construction necessitated labour regimes and complex structures of finance that were industrial and capitalist phenomena in themselves. But their obscurity lies in the fact that, despite their centrality to the literature of “global” or “world” history, ships as historical arenas in their own right have often remained beyond the global historian’s gaze, featuring merely as “other spaces” in our work.
With essays by Roland Wenzlhuemer, G. Balachandran, Tamson Pietsch, Johanna de Schmidt, Frances Steel, and Martin Dusinberre, this special issue places ships in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries at the heart of debates in global history more generally. The issue is introduced by Dusinberre and Wenzlhuemer’s editorial essay, “Being in Transit: Ships and Global Incompatibilities”.
