Source, Photo Number: 133139, Fortepan, Magyar Műszaki és Közlekedési Múzeum / Történeti Fényképek Gyűjteménye / Óbudai Hajógyár gyűjteménye
Constantin Ardeleanu: Steamboat Modernity book reviewed by Adrian George Matus
Discussions around the Danube’s role in shaping modern East-Central Europe have captured significant attention among scholars in recent years. By now, there is a broad consensus that this river helped create and define a specific cultural space. By using terms such as the Danube Monarchy, Donauraum, or variations of the same idea, some scholars go as far as to center it as an alternative geography to East-Central Europe.
Yet, in academic exchanges, it is less clear how the relationship between technology and Danube shaped specific events and larger developments. Steamboat Modernities. Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860 clarifies this issue. Its author, Constantin Ardeleanu is a Professor of Modern History at the Lower Danube University of Galați and a long-term Fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest. Throughout his career, he has investigated the role of the Danube in the modernization of Wallachia and Moldavia and has published extensively on the history of the Lower Danube in particular.
Source, Fortepan, Magyar Földrajzi Múzeum / Erdélyi Mór cége, Photo Number 87009
The “history of a waterway,” as Ardeleanu defines it, is a research angle that started to be applied to the Danube about a decade ago.[i] The central claim of his new book is that the main vector of modernization in this area was not trains but rather steamboats. The steamboat was the crucial way of connecting with the wider world before the networks of train lines were developed, which in the case of Wallachia and Moldavia only happened in the second half of the 19th century. Starting in the 1830s, it was the steamboat that linked Vienna, Pest, Giurgiu, Galați, Sulina with the Black Sea and the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. The harbors facilitated the transport of goods, particularly cereals, and assured the flow of connections on international markets.
However, Ardeleanu employs methods from other subfields to provide a fresh interpretation of his topic. A key achievement of the book is that it manages to immerse the reader into the period by incorporating two main subjects: travel literature and epidemiological regimes.
The extensive coverage of travel literature is in fact the central focus of Steamboat Modernities. Steamboats, often owned by the Austrian company DDSG (Erste Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft), were the main means of connecting the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia to the larger European geopolitical space. The staff members tended to be Austrians, Italians, and Britons whereas the travelers could be boyars who wanted to travel to Western Europe, pashas, engineers, merchants or revolutionaries. This favored an exchange of cultures and a mixing of languages. A trip from Vienna to Istanbul lasted at least for three weeks, most often having the same passengers throughout the whole journey. Therefore, Ardeleanu claims, steamboats amounted to a liminal space. This unique form of mobility had important consequences. Beyond the circulation of goods and ideas, it changed worldviews and contributed to the drawing of symbolic boundaries.
Based on travel literature as his primary source, the author’s conceptual argument is that steamboats functioned as heterotopias (understood in the Foucauldian sense). They favored the transmission of ideas, the plotting of revolutions, transporting key political figures incognito, though they also fostered new perceptions that could strengthen clichés about the Principalities.
We may thus note a growing academic interest in the realities and interactions on board ships, seen as “mobile spaces,” as laboratories in which and through which historians can follow processes of historical transformation. Connections give rise to new forms of intermediation, and the state of being in movement or in transit brings with it special experiences, aspects that are generally invisible in historiography. (p. 63)
The second way in which steamboats are linked in an original way to contemporary concerns is the attention devoted to epidemiological regimes. As steamboats boosted people’s mobility, epidemics would also spread more quickly and widely. Chapter 5 of the book reveals that epidemics management was a substantial issue back in the mid-19th century. In order to prove this point, Constantin Ardeleanu uses the lazarettos – quarantine stations placed in the Danube harbors for maritime travelers – as a case study.
The experience of quarantine isolation was an integral part of travel in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s to the 1850s, a time that saw accelerated development in international tourism, but also the global spread of devastating epidemics, lazarettos and periods of quarantine arrest figure prominently in travel narratives. (149)
The Austrian Empire created no fewer than 16 stations to mitigate the risk of contamination of plague and cholera epidemics from the Ottoman Empire. Everything from the Balkans, including travelers, animals, vehicles and goods needed to pass through a procedure to achieve that. Vienna also aimed to improve its empire’s sanitary situation by transferring part of the “protection” line to the Ottoman Empire. These sanitary measures deployed doctors and transferred knowledge to the Ottoman Empire.
Other European countries closely followed the management of epidemics. The issue soon became an European affair: international institutions and conferences aimed to tackle the issue and provided additional support to the Ottoman Empire. By the 1840s, around 80 quarantine stations with modern sanitary regulations prevented the spread of epidemics from their places of origin. At the same time, these measures could reinforce an Orientalist view of South-Eastern Europe. Ardeleanu also brings examples on how these rationalist measures would at times clash with local religious norms:
this international support led some faithful Muslims to see the quarantine system as a foreign imposition. There was particular opposition to certain decontamination measures on the grounds that they were contrary to the principles of Islam. (p. 153)
By focusing on the liminal spaces such as steamboats and lazarettos, the book sheds new light on the role of the Danube in the modernization of Wallachia and Moldavia. While much of historiography tends to emphasize the role of the railroads in the modernization of Europe and the Americas, this book brings nuance to the discussion by underlining the fundamental role of steamboats in modernizing South-Eastern Europe, by following three main dimensions: the transformation of Danube into a transportation infrastructure, the steamboat as a heterotopia, as well as the change of the notion of space in this region. While these topics were previously studied by Gatejel and Tinku-Szathmáry, Chapter 5, dedicated to the lazarettos, adds a new concern to the historiography of the waterways. Through it, the author reveals how epidemic management became the subject of recurrent debates in the 19th century, debates that were linked to mobility along the Danube. Such health measures often led to improvements, but could simultaneously create new resentments and draw imaginary boundaries rooted in Orientalist perspectives.
[i] Luminita Gatejel, “Overcoming the Iron Gates: Austrian Transport and River Regulation on the Lower Danube, 1830s–1840s,” Central European History 49, no. 2 (2016), 162–180, Luminita Gatejel, Engineering the Lower Danube. Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland (CEU Press, 2022) or Balázs Tinku-Szathmáry, “Gőzhajóval a Dunán Bécsből Konstantinápolyig,” Közlekedés-és technikatörténeti Szemle (2018), 11–38. See also Luminita Gatejel, “1829: Megalapítják a Dunagőzhajózási Társaságot” in Magyarország globális története. A kezdetektől 1868-ig, eds. Ferenc Laczó, András Vadas, and Bálint Varga (Budapest: Corvina, 2023), 443-446.
