Business Travels and Cold War mobilities

Abstract

In the last two decades, the humanities and social sciences have confronted themselves with the need to account for the increasing mobility of people and goods. In 2017, following a debate that Gijs Mom had initiated more than a decade before, Massimo Moraglio, as the new editor of The Journal of Transport History, voiced the need for a new ontology for transport history to enable it to adopt mobilities as analytical lenses linking historical research on transport, which had long focused on the development of technologies and the economic function of transport, with a new awareness of the multiple experiences of traveling and the social and cultural nature of movement. The articles in this special issue, focusing on business travels, are situated at the crossroads of the disciplines and approaches that have characterized historical research on transportation and mobility to this day, and contribute to the ongoing debate about the future of transport history.