The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the United States, 1900–1914 by Drew Keeling (review)

In his book, The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the United States, 1900–1914, Drew Keeling explores the “history of the eleven million Europe-born migrants who made nineteen million ocean crossings on eighteen thousand voyages of several hundred vessels of two dozen steamship lines plying between Europe and the principle ports of the United States.” He successfully fills a void in migration scholarship that largely overlooks the business of transatlantic migration and how it helped shape the scope and form of this mass migration. In doing so, he shows that “[t]raditionally emphasized factors such as travel costs, wage differentials, profit motives, and ethnic prejudices” prove inadequate as explanations for increased migration during the period 1900–1914. Instead, he successfully argues that better strategies for coping with risk and uncertainty within the business of migration helped to spur these changes.

Keeling examines the three major players in transatlantic migration: “the movers, the moving, and the sovereign authorities overseeing the movement.” To do this, he organizes the book into seven chapters, in roughly chronological order, with a conclusion and epilogue that discuss how the migration business faltered after 1914 with the beginning of World War I and was further crippled after the war by increasing governmental restrictions on migration. Chapter one primarily discusses the lead-up to the migration boom of the twentieth century with the advent of the steamship and introduces the main characters that appear throughout the text: the leaders of the shipping lines, such as Bruce Ismay, and governmental leaders like Theodore Roosevelt. Chapter two focuses on his main argument by describing the economics of the business and how it was shaped by risk management measures. He argues that moving costs, contrary to popular opinion, changed little during this period, so decreased cost cannot be considered a factor in the increased flow of migration. Instead, he finds that moving to America generally meant improved economic circumstances for most migrants, provided the United States was not in the middle of an economic downturn. Therefore, the composition, magnitude, and makeup of the migration was determined more by risk. Risk management strategies incorporated by migrants, transportation companies, and governments, then, were key to determining the overall nature of migration. Migrants primarily used kinship networks to limit their risks, but the following chapters describe how the businesses were organized and functioned and further explore how the major actors mitigated risk. Chapters three and four focus on efforts to avoid price competition between the various lines. Chapter five describes how the lines limited the risk affiliated with public policies on migration. Chapter six discusses strategies for managing the vagaries of the business cycle including strategies such as using profits from good years to support them in leaner years. Chapter seven, finally, covers how the companies and the migrants minimized the physical hazards of the crossing, especially in reference to the sinking of the Titanic. It also gives a glimpse of the experiences of some few migrants through excerpts from the migrants themselves.

Transatlantic migration was indeed a transformative experience, not only for migrants but also for the sending and receiving countries and the private companies that helped them to reach their destination. Beginning in the 1840s, the steamship made transatlantic travel much easier and more comfortable by reducing the length of the trip from four to eight weeks to two, and eventually, as technology improved, less than one. This made relocation easier and more reliable. As shipping lines consolidated through the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mostly following economic downturns that weakened the flow of migrants to the United States, the simultaneous change in origin of the migrants from northeastern Europe to southern Europe meant that shipping companies had to change strategies. Many, especially German companies, used transit companies on the ground to transport potential immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to the ports in Northwestern Europe...