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

旅途中的生活是21世纪世界的一个关键特征。今天，社会秩序已经建立，并可以独立于领土秩序而蓬勃发展。流动、过渡和交流构成了当代社会和这些社会中的群体重塑自身的框架。这个项目通过考察过去的全球化经验，为这些当代现象提供了新的历史背景。它建议我们把轮船作为过境的典范历史空间，并把这些空间中的人作为所讨论时期全球化的未被充分研究的主角。研究19世纪末20世纪初轮船的环境，就是把现代世界的象征之一放在放大镜下。对船上生活的分析揭示了运输中的社会秩序。长途客轮乘客发现自己处于部分暂停的阶段，被扔进了一个由其他旅客组成的人造社区中。在缺乏熟悉的以陆地为基础的社会文化框架的情况下，社会关系需要重新建立、重新制定，而且往往也需要在船上进行调整。因此，这个孤立的、看似短暂的过渡阶段呈现出一种形成的特征，成为群体和身份建立过程的场景。此外，这些过程与旅行前和旅行后的时期密切相关。乘客在运输途中暂停，反思、重建和重新定义过去，就像他们对未来的想象和规划一样。该项目将轮船的空间视为一个非凡的历史舞台，在这个舞台上，船员和乘客都必须理解他们周围的环境和他们自己在其中的位置。该项目询问长途轮船通道上的历史参与者如何在这一过渡阶段谈判他们的社会地位。它考察了身份认同和社区建设的过程，以及船舶上社会秩序的特殊性。这艘船上的社区感是如何出现的？相对于其他海运群体和船上以外的世界，“乘客”如何让自己对陆上的标志感到放心，比如社会地位和国家认同？在运输途中的情绪、心理和生理后果是什么？旅程从哪里开始，在哪里结束？该项目的主要目的是调和我们对全球联系及其引发的史学的理解--“相互关联”、“纠缠”和“全球”的历史。以轮船为范例，该项目将过渡既是一个阶段，也是一个认识论范式。它结合了对主题的社会、文化和数字历史方法，以突出过境的深刻社会、文化和政治后果；这些后果也与当今世界有关。通过这样做，我们提供了框定和叙述全球历史本身的学科的新方法。

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.