Editorial – being in transit: ships and global incompatibilities

Where was the nineteenth century?' asks Jrgen Osterhammel in his magnum opus, The transformation of the world. It was to be found, he says, in the European 'discoveries' of new lands, in the naming of the world, in the 'mental maps' of how the world's regions were imagined to be interconnected, and in the relationship between the land and the sea. 1 In the articles that make up this special issue, we argue that the critical sites of the nineteenth century, broadly defined, were the phenomena that connected these discoveries, mental maps, world regions, and the land and the sea: ships.