MedMaD · Mediterranean Mass Mobilities and Displacements in the Age of Steam (1869-1914)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the technological revolution profoundly reshaped maritime transport, accelerating the circulation of passengers and allowing steamships to be used for the first time to move large masses of people across the sea cheaply. Alongside migrants crossing the sea to relocate within the Mediterranean basin or to reach hub ports for transoceanic migration, steamships teemed with masses of refugees, pilgrims, deportees, workers engaged in cyclical or occasional movements to access integrated labour markets and even enslaved people, often smuggled as ordinary passengers. In their movements, they all experienced varying degrees of freedom and coercion, determined by the vital interest of colonial empires and nascent nation-states in controlling and managing mass flows across the Mediterranean for political, economic and public health reasons. Once at sea, however, these heterogeneous masses were all forcibly united by a single carrier, the steamship, and the same status of passengers. MedMaD proposes a novel approach to the study of mass mobility in the “wider Mediterranean”, including the Black Sea and the Red Sea, between the opening of the Suez Canal, in 1869, and the beginning of the First World War, in 1914. The project's overall objective is to examine from a global perspective the development of mass transport maritime services in the Mediterranean during the age of steam and analyse their impact on inter- and extra-Mediterranean mobilities and displacements of passengers travelling in low-cost classes (third- and fourth-class or deck passengers, as defined by the ticket).