“Commercial and political needs demand the establishment of a Black Sea port”: Infrastructure development, opportunities and anxieties in an Eastern European periphery (1860s–1870s)

Abstract

This paper is the biography of a failed infrastructural project: that of building a Romanian seaport and of linking it to the mainland via a canal and/or a railway. It details its rich life, its initiators and partisans, but also its (mostly foreign) contenders; “born” in the early 1860s in a certain geopolitical, economic or infrastructural environment, the initiative morphed in the coming years in close connection and in direct competition with complementary or rival projects. While the plan of having an “independent” Romanian Black Sea port remained central to the Jibrieni project, most of its other infrastructural components were continuously reimagined, so as to fit into the Romanian government's priorities and – with them – into the extremely dynamic transportation map of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1860s–1870s.