Safe Waters. Austrian Seafarers Between Charity and Welfare, ca. 1850–1920

The article aims to highlight the characteristics and criticalities of the measures aimed at “ensuring” the “safety” of Austrian seamen, their families and the communities to which they belonged from the so-called Gründerzeit of the 1850s to post-WWI. Since seafaring exposed the workers and their families to the risk of poverty, the charitable foundations represented a pillar on which the Austrian shipping sector rested. In the last decades of the 19th century, the Austrian seafaring industrial revolution changed the scenario, not the seafarers’ welfare regulatory framework. In the meantime, seafarers’ socio-economic role and public image underwent a sort of transilience.