Suchergebnisse

This study explores the connection between global maritime and migration networks to better understand the acceleration of the transatlantic migration rate that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It brings together the actions of migrants, government regulators, transatlantic shipping companies, and the agents who represented them to determine the motives and opportunities for transatlantic mass-migration. The study is comprised of an introductory chapter, seven essays by maritime scholars, and a conclusion. The subject is approached from three particular discussion points: the rate of development and the accessibility of transport networks for European migrants; the competition between shipping companies and the subsequent influence on migration; and the integration of labour markets in both Europe and America. It concludes by suggesting both maritime and migration historians should merge their respective fields by including the larger frameworks of each discipline to gain further understanding of their disciplines, and identifies the role of ports and shipping companies as crucial to any further study of mass migration

This article provides a business perspective of the role of transport companies in directing transatlantic refugees during the First World War. It details the financial, administrative and logistical barriers that stranded Americans faced at the outbreak of the war. It discusses how authorities, NGOs and especially shipping companies organised the transportation of approximately 150,000 people in a matter of weeks along the well-oiled business networks which transported millions of migrants across the Atlantic. This is compared with the attempts to transfer Belgian refugees across the Atlantic throughout the war. Shipping companies used, in part, strategies similar to those of NGOs to gain authority in directing refugees, yet they saw them as a business opportunity which also explains the differences. It highlights that the dynamics between refugees, authorities, NGOs and transport companies shape migration policies, and argues that those companies should be integrated much more into migration governance studies. The article concludes that transport companies' expert and logistical know-how made them indispensable actors in implementing migration policies, even when their business interests were severely threatened by wartime mobility restrictions.

Based on Freeman's model of interest group-driven migration policies, the article gives a qualitative inside look on a neglected actor during the formative years of US immigration reform. It analyzes the central role of the shipping companies in coordinating the pro-immigration campaign with and against other interest groups. Their lobbying is divided into two complementary sections: inside top-down efforts (lobbyists) to influence legislators and outside bottom-up efforts (migrant communities and the press) to mobilize the public. It assesses the importance of public opinion in their lobby campaigns and the shipping companies' success in delaying far-reaching restrictions until 1917.

The article gives a business perspective on the development of transit routes during the long nineteenth century transatlantic migration from Europe to the us. It first stresses that due to the economic interests generated by transatlantic migrant transport the political economy behind early migration policies centred much more on how people moved rather than who was doing the moving. These had a lasting impact on transit routes. With nationalism on the rise and economic liberalism declining, measures to direct transmigrants to national ports and companies radicalised. Against this background and to neutralise competitive pressures shipping companies united in cartels to protect established routes. Their perspective gives new insights on how transit routes developed; on transit costs; the service it included and the quality thereof. It explains how shipping lines extended their services in port-cities and inland transport hubs to guarantee a smooth transit as an integrated part of their trade.

Bounding Mass Migration across the Atlantic: European Shipping Companies between US Border Building and Evasion (1860s–1920s) This article questions the assumption that the rhetoric, laws and border controls to restrict immigration into the United States originated on the Pacific border to exclude Asians and were later transferred to the Atlantic border to limit European migration. To demonstrate that two separate immigration regimes had developed, I use the much-neglected perspective of passenger shipping companies as key actors in the development of border enforcement. As still relevant today, the authorities used transport companies as an integrated part of their border control system, yet at the same time this put them in a privileged position to help their clients pass or even evade controls. The article starts with contextualising the commercial interests behind maritime migrant transport and migration policies. It then analyses the implementation of border controls at the maritime front doors, and subsequently discusses how these had been evaded. Finally, this paper discusses how border controls had first spread from the US ports of entry to the northern and southern land borders and European hubs of departure, before finally consolidating into a frontier at the Mexican-American border, which divided the core from the periphery. I question the conception of a national border policy by clearly differentiating the Pacific and Atlantic border regimes, within which there were important local differences.

Migration is one of key factors to the existence of which we owe the emergence of the modern urban condition that continues to shape the life of large populations today. Precisely the same reasons that generated great urban growth of European cities in the late nineteenth century were responsible for concurrent mass migration overseas – to North America and elsewhere – for a number of reasons. Given the everyday experience of the mass of transient migrants passing through these cities that lasted for decades, the lack of interest on behalf of urban historians to this large and heterogeneous group is surprising. Analysing such transient migrant spaces and routes, and their diverse actors at the city level for some of the most important transit points within the European continent (Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Budapest) as well as for select ports of departure (Bremen, Hamburg, Liverpool, Marseille and Rotterdam), this special issue aims to link the recent attention to transmigration within migration history to urban history thereby highlighting the relevance of transit cities to the study of overseas migration.