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

交通中的生命是21世纪世界的一个重要特征。今天，社会秩序已经建立，并且可以独立于领土秩序而蓬勃发展。运动、过渡和交流形成了当代社会和这些社会中的群体重塑自我的框架。该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。它建议我们将蒸汽船作为运输的典范历史空间，并将这些空间中的人们作为问题期间全球化的未被充分研究的主角。研究19世纪末和20世纪初蒸汽船的环境，就是把现代世界的一个象征放在放大镜下。对船上生活的分析揭示了运输中的社会秩序。长途船上的乘客发现自己处于一种部分暂停的状态，被抛进了一个由其他旅客组成的人为群体中。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，而且往往还需要就地调整。因此，孤立和看似短暂的过境阶段呈现出一种形成特征，成为群体和身份建设过程的场景。此外，这些过程与旅行前后的时期密切相关。在旅途中，乘客们反思、重建和重新定义过去，就像他们想象和规划未来一样。该项目将蒸汽船的空间作为一个非凡的历史舞台，船员和乘客都必须理解周围的环境和他们自己在其中的位置。该项目探讨了长途蒸汽船的历史角色如何在这一运输阶段协商他们的社会地位。它考察了身份和社区建设的过程，以及船上社会秩序的特殊性。一种社区意识是如何在船上产生的？“乘客”如何使自己对社会地位和国家身份等陆上标志（相对于-à-vis其他海上群体和-à-vis船外世界）感到放心？在旅途中的情感、精神病理和生理后果是什么？旅程从哪里开始，又在哪里结束？该项目的主要目的是重新理解我们对全球联系的理解，以及它们所激发的历史编纂——“连接”、“纠缠”和“全球”历史。该项目以蒸汽船为例，将运输作为一个阶段和认识论范式。它将社会、文化和数字历史方法结合起来，以突出过境的深刻社会、文化和政治影响；这些影响也与当今世界有关。在这样做的过程中，我们提供了构建和叙述全球历史学科本身的新方法。

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.