Panel “Global Connections in Socialist Maritime History”

Maritime history has played a crucial role in global history writing. It allows to reconstruct a multitude of interactions, entanglements and transfers that transcend political borders and orders. However, global maritime history has been mainly concerned with connections between Western Europe and the Atlantic world with Asia, Latin America and Africa. Global connections in the socialist world, have so far played a rather marginal role in the field. While the history of socialism has been increasingly studied from a global perspective, thereby focusing on relations between state socialist countries in Eastern Europe and socialist states and movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the maritime world of the socialist sphere has rarely been considered. In this panel, we address this missing dimension at the intersection of global and socialist history by investigating the global connections of the socialist maritime worlds.

Our first perspective is socialist merchant fleets, which grew immensely after the Second World War and sailed global routes, and their ports which became nodes of connections due to the regular docking of ships from ountries from all over the world. We are particularly interested in the histories of fleets and ports in the Soviet republics in the Black Sea region and in East Central Europe, challenging the understanding of Moscow’s domination over the whole socialist world. Their fleets allowed the participation in the global economy, and created global connections. Writing their history helps to challenge historical narratives that portray many parts of Eastern Europe as peripheries.

Our second perspective focuses on people, infrastructures and politics of the socialist maritime sphere which reveal connections and entanglements that are hard to grasp in global histories of the territorial socialist world. We think, among others, of sailing crews and their experiences of cultural encounters, of port workers and their contacts to the international shipping networks, of the concrete operation of socialist shipping industries and of the connectivity it entailed, and of socialist shipping policies influencing the international politics on maritime transport and trade.

In a double-panel on socialist maritime history during the Cold War period, we aim to investigate three topics: First, the global networks, exchanges and transfers of socialist merchant fleets (e.g. charter ships and charter organizing firms, global trade routes, workers on the ships etc.) and the intricacies of globalization processes; second, the globalization of socialist ports (foreign ownership and acquisition policies of landlocked countries) with their global connections; and third, the international circulation of maritime knowledge and policies of socialist countries and their impact on international politics.

These lines of investigation, we believe, are not only instructive for the exploration of the socialist dimension of global maritime history, but open intriguing questions regarding the nexus of land-based history and maritime history which have potential for transregional comparisons.

We hope to bring together scholars from maritime history, global history, and Eastern European and socialist history, to discuss global maritime entanglements and their implications from a micro-historical perspective on socialist ports, from a global perspective on socialist fleets, and from the international circulation of socialist modes of organizing shipping.

With this approach we intend to:
- rethink the concept of a “divided globalization” and an “alternative globalization” of Eastern Europe and the “Eastern Bloc” during the Cold War: Linkages of maritime trading networks on a global level (including examples from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe as well as from Africa, Latin America and Asia) highlight the participation of socialist fleets in globalized maritime networks, beyond the Cold War Bloc logic and an East-South-line of investigation;
- consider the local implications of maritime globalization in the organization, surveillance, and economic relevance of port zones in socialist countries in the context of the world, thereby challenging the understanding of “national” fleets, “national ports” and their histories by introducing the Socialist space into global maritime history;
- reveal the international circulation of maritime knowledge and policies from the socialist world and its impact on both national and international shipping policies and development.
- reconsider Socialist coast as profoundly global spaces and challenge our understanding of homogenous socialist societies.

We plan to publish the papers in a special issue after the congress and thus kindly ask for original and unpublished proposals.