Transfers

This issue is the last of volume 2. With this, we have reached a milestone in our fledgling history and a threshold to the last volume in our series of three in which we have strived, and still strive, to get all the important elements of a good journal in place. According to our original plans our priorities were to establish top-quality submissions, a splendid pool of knowledgeable and rigorous but generous transdisciplinary referees, efficient refereeing procedures, satisfactory rejection rates, timely manuscript production, and a subscriber base that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Although quantitatively not yet up to standard, our readership is variegated and adventurous enough to appreciate our desire to “rethink mobility” and dedicate printed space to “mobility writ large.” Before we begin to produce volume 3 (2012) this September, our editorial team will retreat, evaluate, and look each other in the eyes to determine what we can do better.

In the interwar period, cyclists, the most numerous road users, came into increasing conflict with motorists. The debate around road safety and casualties reveals significant differences between the social and political capital available to different classes of road users, despite their legal equality. Drawing on the coverage of the conflict by the Cyclists' Touring Club (CTC) through their monthly Gazette and on the parliamentary record, this article examines how cyclists understood the problem of increasing accident rates and the solutions proffered in press and parliament to address them. The paper considers cyclists in terms of class, representation, power, and status. It further examines how these factors shaped perceptions of the issues at stake in the safety debate in relation to the governance of road space and the appropriate behaviors and responsibilities of road users.

The emergence of the automobile in Belgium from 1895 onwards brutally disrupted the traditional social order on the roads, transforming social practices and the order of society from the mundane-the everyday use of transport-to the more rarified-urban planning and the use of public space. In this article, we will deal with the earliest history of motorization in Belgium. We will analyze motorization as a process of interaction between a specific set of social actors, and focus on its outcome: modern traffic policy as a conflict-management strategy. It is argued that traffic policy evolved from an originally moral strategy into a technical strategy, as engineers and the public road administration introduced Foucauldian approaches in order to discipline the traffic system.

Automobility in the United Kingdom in the period before the First World War moved from irrelevance and ridicule to a normalized leisure activity. With particular reference to the magazines Punch and Motor, this article argues that this process was hastened by middle- and lower-middle-class consumers' receptivity to the automobile and motorcycle, particularly in the period after 1905 when a tolerable mechanical reliability had been achieved. By buying second-hand, and taking short trips and camping weekends, the self-driving, car-owning “modest motorist“ undermined the formal, club-based network of elite motorists and created their own distinct cultural model.

In his recent “manifesto” for future “mobility studies,” Stephen Greenblatt demands that studies investigating mobility from a cultural perspective should (a) make sure not to ignore mobility in the “literal sense,” that is, the “physical, infrastructural, and institutional conditions of movement,” (b) pay attention to “hidden” as well as “conspicuous” forms of movement, (c) look at the “contact zones” of cultural transfer, (d) consider the “tension between individual agency and structural constraint” in these processes and, finally, (e) not forget the “sensation” of “locality,” and the “allure” of “local cultures.”1

In the nineteenth century, a significant change in the modern infrastructures of travel and communications took place. Hans Christian Andersen's (1805-1875) literary career reflected these developments. Social and geographical mobility influenced Andersen's aesthetic strategies and autobiographical concepts of identity. This article traces Andersen's movements toward success and investigates how concepts of identity are related to changes in the material world. The movements of the author and his texts set in motion processes of appropriation: on the one hand, Andersen's texts are evidence of the appropriation of ideas and the way they change by transgressing social spheres. On the other hand, his autobiographies and travelogues reflect how Andersen developed foreign markets by traveling and selling the story of a mobile life. Capturing foreign markets brought about translation and different appropriations of his texts, which the last part of this essay investigates.

Today foreign restaurants and food shops shape the culinary landscape of Britain. While the impact of post-war migration on the traditional eating habits of the British population has received some attention in historical research, the influence of former waves of immigrants has hardly been studied. This paper focuses on the immigration of German pork butchers and their contribution to the development of meat consumption in Britain. By looking at the pattern of migration it will be shown that migrants created geographically widespread networks in Britain. Within these networks they transferred skills, know-how and social capital. Through a complex process of adaptation and appropriation German sausages were incorporated into the British diet. This process involved natives as well as immigrants. The former had to overcome established food habits while the latter had to adapt their recipes to local taste preferences.

This article is concerned with travelling detectives in two different but related senses. On the one hand, it considers the relevance of trains and other vehicles of mobility for detective fiction, both as a topic of fiction and a place of consumption. On the other hand, it registers that detective fiction has to “travel“ in a more abstract sense before the reading traveler can enjoy it. German publishers appropriated the genre, originally a nineteenth-century American and British invention, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on contemporary observations by German cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the essay examines German crime-fiction dime novels from the interwar period, compares them to their American predecessors, and analyzes their relationship to mobility and cultural transfer. The text argues that the spatial mobility of the fictional detective is only possible in a specific cultural environment to which the moving but corporeally immobile reader has to be transferred imaginatively.

“Appropriation“ is a complex term used in many different realms, and an almost ubiquitous phenomenon. Conceptually linked to questions of mobility, appropriation has both a social and physical dimension. This essay delineates the term's employment in key political and academic discourses, and interrogates its inherent logic with regard to possession, the attribution of purpose and value, and the social reciprocity of the parties involved in the act. Starting off with questions of just distribution in modern nation-states, the argument then traces appropriation in contemporary debates on copyright in a digital age, and provides a sketch of the larger political imaginary informing acts of appropriation.

River Flow, Sewer Flow, Street Flow is a location-based, interactive mobile soundscape originally presented in Old Montreal at DHC-ART1 as part of the exhibition Lost Rivers: La Petite St. Pierre. The exhibition took up mobility as a curatorial challenge and featured videos and photographs by underground explorer Andrew Emond and sound compositions by Samuel Thulin. The exhibition thematically resurrected the historic water systems that once traversed the island of Montreal. Daylighting is the process of bringing creeks, streams, and rivers that were buried during the industrial period to the surface. Lost Rivers invited participants to daylight the meandering contours of La Petite St. Pierre virtually on a wintery Montreal night.

Modern transport history in China is rooted in academic support of the modernization effort. Influential and creative historians of the Republican period (1911–1949) reformulated “mobility history” (交通史) as an academic discipline. Its approaches were inspired by Western historical method as well as sociology and ethnology, but retained the tradition of an erudite consideration of all written texts as potential sources. From the 1950s, however, the field became a rarely visited sideline of history. With the restoration and vigorous expansion of academic research since the 1980s, transport and mobility gradually reemerged as a key interest among historians. By the turn of the century, the number of scholars working in this subdiscipline approached critical mass. In 2009, a group of historians working on railroads founded the Association for the History of Modern Chinese Mobility and Society (中国近代交通社会史研究学会). Jiang Pei 江沛 of Nankai University, Tianjin, was the initiator of the association and organized the first meeting. The second meeting, in 2011, was organized by Ding Xianyong 丁贤勇 of Hangzhou Normal University. The third meeting in fall 2012 will be hosted by Fudan University, Shanghai. The following is a brief survey of the field of mobility studies in mainland China, aiming not for exhaustive completeness but for an introduction to non-Chinese-speaking colleagues.

Maritime Centre Vellamo, Tornatorintie 99, Katariina Mauranen, Imperial College London, Kotka, Finland Admission: €8/4 http://www.merikeskusvellamo.fi/en “Spoils of Riches” is open from 25 April to 2 December 2012

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (UK and USA, 2011, Warner Bros. Pictures, Directed by Guy Ritchie. Screenplay Kieran Mulroney and Michele Mulroney. With Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Jared Harris, Noomi Rapace).

Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India's Railway and the Culture of Mobility Vijaya Singh

Caroline S. Hau and Kasian Tejapira, eds., Traveling Nation-makers: Transnational Flows and Movements in the Making of Modern Southeast Asia Nanny Kim

Alan Powell, Northern Voyagers: Australia's Monsoon Coast in Maritime History Joseph Christensen

Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie. Eine Weltgeschichte Marcus Popplow

Phillip Vannini, Ferry Tales: Mobility, Place and Time on Canada's West Coast (Maximiliano E. Korstanje)

David Stradling, The Nature of New York: Environmental History of the Empire State Tom McCarthy

Andrea Giuntini, Le meraviglie del mondo. Il sistema internazionale delle comunicazioni nell'Ottocento Giussepina Pellegrino

Annette Schlimm, Ordnungen des Verkehrs. Arbeit an der Moderne-deutsche und britische Verkehrsexpertise im 20. Jahrhundert Gustav Sjöblom

Fernando Esposito, Mythische Moderne. Aviatik, Faschismus und die Sehnsucht nach Ordnung in Deutschland und Italien Kurt Möser

Kurt Möser, Grauzonen der Technikgeschichte. Technikdiskurse Martina Heßler

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America George Revill