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

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roland Wenzlhuemer
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 312104974

• Final Report Year: 2022

Final Report Abstract

The "Lives in Transit" project took as its starting point the argument that the period of a ship passage, in transit between two places, was no "dead time" without sociocultural relevance. Rather, it was a time of intense interpersonal contact; a time of unmaking, recreating and reaffirming social hierarchies; a time of making new acquaintances and building new networks; a time of shared rituals and common purposes, but one also of demarcation against other social groups within or outside the ship; a time of insecurity and distress, of emotional upheaval - and all this within the confined space of the ship. The German as well as the Swiss subprojects all demonstrated how the seemingly ephemeral phase of transit was formative in many ways for those travelling. Suspended in transit, passengers reflected on the present, rebuilt and redefined the past, just as they imagined and planned for the future. Of particular importance was the broader conceptual work undertaken in the project. While Dusinberre and his team in Zurich came to think that "transplantation" offers a more rigorous analytical framework for some of our proposal's original interests than "transit", Wenzlhuemer and the German project team concentrated on "transit" and from that developed the notion of "disiconnectivity" that now forms the underlying topic of a newly established Käte Hamburger Kolleg at Munich.

Publications

• "Connections in Global History." In: Comparativ 29, (2019), 3, p. 106-121
  Roland Wenzlhuemer
  
• "Global connections in transcultural research." In: Abu-Er-Rub et al. (eds.). Engaging Transculturality. Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies. Abingdon: Routledge 2019, p. 39-51
  Wenzlhuemer, Roland
  
• "Mitsui Bussan and the Manchurian Soybean Trade: Geopolitics and Economic Strategies in China's Northeast, ca. 1870s-1920s." Business History, December 1, (2019), 1-22
  Mizuno, Hiromi & Prodöhl, Ines
  
• Mobilität und Kommunikation in der Moderne. Göttingen: UTB/V&R 2020
  Wenzlhuemer, Roland
  
• "Shipping Rocks and Sand. Ballast in Global History." ln: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington 68, (Spring 2021), p. 3-17
  Roland Wenzlhuemer