State Power, Commercial Airlines, and the Globalization of Airspace, c. 1918–1955

Andreas Greiner

From the 1920s onward, state-sponsored airline companies of all major European countries and the United States developed sophisticated route networks following the imperial, political, and economic interests of their home countries. This Habilitation project studies the emergence of the global network of intercontinental air routes between 1918 and the mid-1950s, when the advent of jet propulsion technology fundamentally reshaped international aviation. The project investigates how infrastructure networks were established and governed across national boundaries before, during, and immediately after the Second World War; how airgoing states linked geopolitics (particularly imperialism) with commercial aviation; and how these dynamics played out on the spot. It is the first study to systematically examine the activities of major airlines—Imperial Airways, KLM, Air France, Pan American Airways, and Luft Hansa—and the involvement of their home governments within one single analytical framework.

As a global history of commercial aviation, the project provides a multi-layered analysis of this worldwide infrastructure system. At the macro level, it addresses the expansion of air routes as much as the legal codification of airspace and the diplomatic and economic factors shaping both. Set against the backdrop of a period marked by profound geosystemic conflicts—spanning imperialism, National Socialism, and the early Cold War division of airspace—the project also examines the intense diplomatic debates, and the subsequent international frameworks developed to manage the risks associated with aircraft. At the same time, aviation before the “jet age” provides an appealing subject for adding local layers to the study of global networks because it was, surprisingly, firmly rooted on the ground. An analytical zoom into the microcosms of the hundreds of airfields situated along all intercontinental routes provides new perspectives on the material dimension of commercial aviation and its integration into imperial, military, and geopolitical regimes.