The advent of steamships on the world’s rivers and seas revolutionized economic, political, and cultural realities wherever they started plying. Steamships served as agents of modernization that galvanized regional and global mobility with their ability to convey passengers and cargo relatively inexpensively, rapidly, and safely. This paper aims to turn steamships into arenas of global history and explore the social dimension of cruising by looking at the sociality engendered by the coming of the transportation revolution to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. While gliding along a politically disputed borderland that separated – and connected – the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, steamships themselves became busy platform where voyagers from all corners of the globe engaged in various social exchanges.

This event is organized within the framework of the NetIAS conference series (Network of European Institutes of Advanced Study) hosted by NEC.