During the second half of the nineteenth century, the steam revolution transformed maritime transport by enabling the large-scale, low-cost movement of passengers at sea. Steamships became crucial for the circulation of migrants, refugees, pilgrims, seasonal workers and other mobile populations, whose movements were increasingly shaped by imperial interests, state regulation and public health concerns. At sea, these diverse groups experienced different degrees of freedom and coercion, while at the same time being brought together under shared commercial and legal regimes as low-cost passengers aboard steamships.
Against this background, the MedMaD project addresses a major historiographical gap in existing scholarship, which has long privileged Atlantic mass migration or Mediterranean elite travel, while marginalising the role of Mediterranean-based steamship companies in transporting low-cost passengers across the “wider Mediterranean” (including the Black Sea and the Red Sea). By focusing on the period between the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the First World War, the project repositions Mediterranean mass mobility within a global context of market integration, imperial competition and technological change.
The overall objective of MedMaD is to examine the development of low-cost maritime mass transport services in the “wider Mediterranean” and to assess their impact on inter- and extra-Mediterranean mobilities and displacements. The project adopts a comparative perspective centred on three major state-subsidised steamship companies—the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, the Compagnia Rubattino (later Navigazione Generale Italiana), and the Austrian Lloyd—demonstrating how private economic interests, state policies and sanitary regulation jointly shaped steam-driven mass mobility at sea. Particular attention is devoted to the commodification of low-cost travel, the standardisation of passenger classes, and the reorganisation of steamship spaces as environments designed to manage, control and, when deemed as necessary, segregate large numbers of travellers.
By combining economic, political and material dimensions, MedMaD offers a reinterpretation of how maritime transport systems shaped mass mobility in the age of steam. In doing so, it links nineteenth-century maritime transport infrastructures to enduring debates on mobility, displacement and the regulation of movement.
