This volume discusses the effects of industrialization on maritime trade, labour and communities in the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the 1850s to the 1920s. The 17 essays are based on new evidence from multiple type of primary sources on the transition from sail to steam navigation, written in a variety of languages, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Russian and Ottoman.
Questions that arise in the book include the labour conditions, wages, career and retirement of seafarers, the socio-economic and spatial transformations of the maritime communities and the changes in the patterns of operation, ownership and management in the shipping industry with the advent of steam navigation. The book offers a comparative analysis of the above subjects across the Mediterranean, while also proposes unexplored themes in current scholarship like the history of navigation.
Contributors are: Luca Lo Basso, Andrea Zappia, Leonardo Scavino, Daniel Muntane, Eduard Page Campos, Enric Garcia Domingo, Katerina Galani, Alkiviadis Kapokakis, Petros Kastrinakis, Kalliopi Vasilaki, Pavlos Fafalios, Georgios Samaritakis, Kostas Petrakis, Korina Doerr, Athina Kritsotaki, Anastasia Axaridou, and Martin Doerr.
Apostolos Delis, Ph.D.,(2010), Ionian University, is Principal Researcher and co-founder of the Centre for Maritime History in the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH. He is the author of the Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding. Economy, Technology and Institutions in Syros in the Nineteenth Century(2015).
Jordi Ibarz, Ph.D., (2001), University of Barcelona, is Associate Professor of Modern History at that university and member of the research group “Work, Institutions and Gender”. His main research interests are in labour history, especially the history of dock workers and maritime labour. Recently he published (in Spanish), the End of the guild system, liberalism and development of capitalist labour relations in the port of Barcelona, 1834-1873(2020).
Anna Sydorenko,Ph.D., (2017), Ionian University, is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH. She is co-Editor in the Between Grain and oil from the Azov to the Caucasus: the Port-cities of the Eastern Coast of the Black Sea, late 18th – Early 20th century (2020).
Matteo Barbano, Ph.D., (2016), University of Genoa, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH. He published his first monograph English Tangier: Within the Straits: Tangeri, gli inglesi e il Mediterraneo occidentale nella seconda metà del XVII secolo, (2019).
The book is addressed to a wide audience that includes academics and scholars, specialists as well as students interested in maritime, economic, social and labor history of the Mediterranean and European studies.