Transport Revolution and Travels to Asia, 1860s-1920s

During the "long" 19th century, a technological revolution occurred, leading to the emergence of new means of transport such as steamships, railways, cars, aeroplanes, bicycles, and rickshaws. This transport revolution not only fundamentally transformed modes of travel and made distant lands more accessible, but it also significantly impacted how travellers experienced the world. The authors of this volume aim to deepen the understanding of the influence of these new modes of transportation and their coexistence with older ones by incorporating a comprehensive range of sources written by both European and Asian travellers. The approach presented in this volume is inspired by the anthropology of the senses, the sociology of travel, and the cultural history of transport. These methodological frameworks are applied to accounts of travels to, from, and within Asia. This perspective enables a focus on various contexts not visible in Europe, including imperialism, Eurocentric approaches to modernisation, and the reactions of colonised peoples to these developments.

Tomasz Ewertowski, PhD, is a lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University, China. He graduated from and worked as a researcher at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. His research interests include travel writing studies, imagology, and comparative literature. He has served as a principal investigator on two Polish National Science Centre grants. His publications include a monograph, Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (2020) and articles in journals like Studies in Travel Writing, Mobilities, Indonesia and the Malay World. Waclaw Forajter is an Associate Professor at University of Silesia in Katowice. He is the author of five academic books, including Kolonizator skolonizowany. Przypadek Sygurda Wisniowskiego (Colonized colonizer. Sygurd Wisniowski's case; University of Silesia 2014); Dyslokacja. Studia o literaturze i innych dyskursach XIX wieku (Dislocations. Studies in literature and other discourses of the 19th century; University of Silesia 2022) and several dozen articles in Polish scientific periodicals. He also translated from French a philosophical monograph Esthétique de la photographie of François Soulages and the essays of Paul Valéry and Jean-Luc Nancy. His research interest focus on 19th-century history, theory of literature, anthropology of culture, and postcolonial theory. Oliwia Gromadzka, PhD, is a student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan in the field of History. She works on issues of European colonialism, the history of intercultural contacts, space studies, and postcolonial discourse.

List of contributors Introduction: Transport Revolution and Travels to Asia from the 1860s to the 1920s Tomasz Ewertowski, Waclaw Forajter, - "'Two Distant Points': Serbian travels to Asia 1860s-1920s" Vladimir Gvozden, NataSa Milivojevic - "Two Journeys to Siberia: Carceral Mobility, Social Change, and Mechanised Transport in Waclaw Sieroszewski's Writings" Kyunney Takasaeva, Marta Czerwieniec-Ivasyk, Tomasz Ewertowski - "How strange and out of place that motor seemed": Automobile journeys in Mongolia, 1907-1930" Tomasz Ewertowski - "Capturing Asia from a bird's eye view: A computational analysis of language patterns in Polish travel writing (1870s-1920s)" Anna Kolos, Agnieszka Karlinska - "Modernity as an element of the colonial landscape in Polish travel diaries from the latter half of the nineteenth century" Oliwia Gromadzka - "The impact of the means of transport on Jelena J. Dimitrijevic's travel imagination" Vladimir Ðuric - "'Bird's Eye View of Unknown Countries': Two Flight Expeditions to Asia" Mikolaj Paczkowski - "Temporary and precarious alliances: Travelling among the others in Polish travelogues from Asia" Waclaw Forajter - "José Rizal on Ships and Trains: Dreams, Timetables, Nightmares" Jan Mrázek - "Imperial Cloud: China and Its Inhabitants in Cycling Travel Books of Thomas Stevens, Thomas Allen & William Sachtleben and John Foster Fraser" Grzegorz Moroz - "Journey to the West: Kang Youwei's perception of modern transportation" Peng Yuchao Index