We present a continuous time series on first cabin passenger fares for ocean travel from New York to the British Isles covering nearly a century of time. We discuss the conceptual and empirical difficulties of constructing such a time series, and examine the reasons for differences between the behavior of advertised fares and those based on passenger revenues. We find that while there are conceptual differences between these two measurements, as well as differences in the average values, the two generally moved in parallel, which means that the advertised fare series can serve as a reasonable proxy for movement of the revenue-based fares. We also find that advertised fares declined over time, roughly paralleling the drop in freight rates for U.S. bulk exports, until around 1890, but thereafter increased while freight rates continued to decline. We propose several hypotheses for this divergent behavior and suggest lines of future research.
The relocation of Europeans across the North Atlantic during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century was the culmination of the longest-lived and most widely documented transoceanic migration of modern times. This enormous population transfer was a great human drama, a major international demographic shift, and a massive historical experiment in cultural transformation during a period of unprecedented globalization. This migration was also a complex and powerful travel business containing both risks and rewards for its three fundamental participants: the movers, the moved, and the sovereign authorities on either side of the borders being traversed. Prior studies have not adequately explained this business nor appreciated the extent to which the various strategies for dealing with its associated risks were crucial, largely congruent, and self-reinforcing elements of the overall migration process.
This essays explores the peak period of voluntary mass migration between Europe and the United States - 1900 to 1914. It focuses on the four major networks that enabled migration in such high numbers: kinship and community; steamship agents; steamship conferences; and government regulatory bodies. It analyses the push and pull factors of mass migration; the business risks plaguing passenger cargo over freight cargo; the US political responses to mass migration; the cost of migration; and the approaches to risk management in migration networks. It concludes by claiming that the well-documented risk-mitigating networks during the ‘Great Migration’ offers insights into the migration networks of the early twenty-first century and provides possible solutions for coping with the contemporary risks of globalisation.
AND INTRODUCTORY REMARKS:Repeat crossings of the North Atlantic by European migrants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were more frequent, faster-growing, and had more intricate and significant impacts on the overall long-distance relocation process, than previous scholarship has appreciated. This result is revealed by the first comprehensive accounting of all crossings between Europe and North America during the period, and by a consistent, broad, and process-based definition of migration which encompasses all transoceanic journeys except those made by tourists and business travellers. The rise of repeat migration between Europe and the United States was a rational response of migrant networks to the growth of "floating" job opportunities in America, and to the need for diversifying the risks of remote and uncertain employment across multiple individuals making multiple moves. This is a revision of the earlier 2006 working paper of the same title. The author is grateful for comments and suggestions by
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