Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830-1860

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe’s peripheries.

Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. The book offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising. Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization.

Constantin Ardeleanu is a senior researcher at the Institute of South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy and at the New Europe College - Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest. Previously, he was Professor of Modern Romanian History at the Department of History, Philosophy and Sociology of the ＂Lower Danube＂ University of Galati. Ardeleanu is interested in the social and economic history of Danubian Europe and the Black Sea region since the eighteenth century. He has published extensively on various topics related to the opening of the Black Sea to international trade and shipping, and the market integration of southeastern European port cities.