This book, the author explains, “comes out of a longstanding passion for travel and for the Danube” (xiii). Constantin Ardeleanu has in fact made significant scholarly contributions to both fields, publishing books on diplomacy and trade on the Lower Danube alongside numerous articles on early travelers who came to Romania and on notable Romanians who ventured abroad. Pulling together these two strands, Steamboat Modernity recreates and analyzes voyages on the Danube in the early days of steam. The book covers multiple topics, including the expansion of riverine infrastructure, the functioning of the quarantine system, Westerners’ views of “the East,” and Romanian travelers’ embrace of modernity. The text is lively, brisk, accessible, and nicely translated from a 2021 Romanian edition by James Christian Brown. Indeed, the press should have kept the original Romanian subtitle—“travelers, space, imagination”—which more accurately captures the book’s main contributions than the one in English it now has.

Steamboat Modernity begins in the early nineteenthth century, when war and technology transformed the middle and lower stretches of the Danube. In 1829, Russia and the Ottoman Empire made peace and signed the Treaty of Adrianople, which gave Russia effective control over the mouth of the Danube, expanded the autonomy of Moldavia and Wallachia, and spurred the export of cereals from the region. Steamboats appeared at the same time, and by the mid-1830s, regular service had been established from Vienna to the Black Sea. The book’s first section describes the development of this “natural highway,” stressing how quickly travel on the Danube became commodified, with steamboats offering “speed, comfort, accessibility, and safety” to passengers at attainable prices (58). This did not prevent Western travelers from feeling and, crucially, writing like explorers of a strange new world. Nor did it remove all the difficulties of travel: Ardeleanu’s account at times glosses over the enduring challenges of nineteenthth-century river transport, from low water and sandbanks to ice and inadequate maps.

Travelers moving along the length of the Danube invariably compared the many regions they encountered. Western travelers typically went downriver, but some, like Hans Christian Andersen, journeyed upstream. Whichever direction they chose, they invariably brought along heavy cultural baggage. Thus, even as they marveled at the picturesque scenery and views, Westerners on the Lower Danube were quick to point to what they saw as pervasive dirt and squalor, palpable material backwardness, and an insidious Russian presence. Ardeleanu rightly notes the “generalities, clichés, and prejudices” in these observations (115), confirming what other scholars have written about the Western imaginary. More original is the book’s treatment of Romanian travelers, who used steamboats to access distant parts of Europe. Ardeleanu views this as a largely positive process, in which Romanian elites “were quick to come to terms with the new technical discoveries and, through them, with modern spaces and times” (4). One wonders, however, about more humble people who lived and worked on the river; what did the advent of steamboats mean to sailors, stevedores, soldiers, and peasants?

The book’s best sections deftly reconstruct life aboard early steamboats. Ardeleanu’s wide knowledge of travelers’ accounts and good eye for detail help readers imagine the experience of spending days cooped up with strangers from many different lands. For all the steamboat’s newfound speed, people still found themselves with hours on their hands, which they filled, in the words of one traveler, with “talking, listening, smoking, musing, whistling, singing, and gazing at the dense clouds” (75). Music and meals provided a welcome distraction, as did stops in ports along the river. The result was an “intense social life” with a markedly cosmopolitan character (62). Of course, the crowded conditions had their downsides too, as engaging paragraphs on the struggle for sleeping spaces, snoring, personal hygiene, and patterns of segregation make clear.

Steamboats were part of a much larger nineteenthth-century transportation revolution. On the Danube, they allowed ideas, letters, news, parcels, goods, and currency to speed up and down the river. To Ardeleanu, steamboats were important agents of modernity, if short-lived ones, and he repeatedly stresses that railroads swiftly eclipsed them in the second half of the century. “The great river’s day had passed,” is the book’s closing line (222). This is an evocative but not wholly accurate ending: the Danube remained a vital artery for the shipment of goods (particularly of grain and coal) and passenger travel for the next century. Indeed, because of steamboats, it would long continue to shape the lives of the millions of people who lived alongside it.