The Transportation Revolution and Transatlantic Migration, 1850-1914 -- Drew Keeling

THE TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION AND
TRANSATLANTIC MIGRATION , 1850-1914




Prepared for presentations in
Durham, Davis, Hamilton, and Toronto



Drew Keeling
PhD StudentHistory Department
University of California, Berkeley

Draft of September 30, 1998






This is a draft paper. Please do not quote or citeit without permission of the author.
Comments welcome: akeeling@socrates.berkeley.edu



C O N T E N T S1. THE UNCLEAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STEAM-SHIPPING AND MASS MIGRATION p. 32. THE SWIFT DECLINE OF SAIL AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GIANT PASSENGER LINERS p. 83. THE EVOLUTION OF MIGRATION: FROM REFUGEES TO TRAVELLERS p. 18 SOURCES p. 25D A T A T A B L E S 1. Passenger Liners arriving at New York from Europe, 1863-1913 p. 12 2. Net/Gross Tonnage (%), 1894-1913 p. 13 3. Migrants in Cabin, 1870-1914 p. 17 4. The Evolution of North Atlantic Liners, 1840-1914 p. 23 5. Innovations in Steam-shipping and passenger flows, 1851-1913 p. 24A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T This paper has benefitted from the helpful suggestions of Gerald Feldman. However, any remaining inaccuracies are solely attributable to the author. 1. THE UNCLEAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STEAM SHIPPING AND MASS MIGRATION The greatest intercontinental migration in human history coincided with the emergence of the first global travel industry. In the half century between the Civil War and World War I, the Atlantic crossing was the common denominator shared by the millions of polyglot Europeans from whom a majority of Americans today are descended. Between the 1840s and 1914, transatlantic migration to the United States and the annual carrying capacity of transatlantic merchant ships both grew roughly eight-fold, however causal mechanisms between the contemporaneous "transportation revolution" and "Great Migration" have not been well-established in previous literature. In particular, earlier analyses of the technical and economic development of 19th century shipping have focused on freight carriage, leaving the conveyance of passengers in relative obscurity. The research of Douglas North (1958), Gerald Graham (1956), Derek Aldcroft (1969), and Knick Harley (1971 and 1988) provides a solid and mostly consistent description of how steamships, over many decades, were eventually able to out-compete their sailing rivals. What Graham called the "the incredible defiance of the Industrial Revolution by sail" underscores a general consensus that the technological diffusion of oceanic steampower and economic adjustments to it were gradual. Route by route, starting with the "short hauls" and progressing to the "long hauls", steamlines used slowly accumulating technical advantages to undercut sailing ships by offering exporters and importers lower freight rates. However, this is an incomplete maritime saga, for three reasons. First of all, the largest international shipping market in the late 19th century was the North Atlantic. It was dominated by large shipping lines whose principal business was not freight but passengers, and most of those were migrants. Secondly, the steamers' takeover of the migrant trade from sailing ships was not gradual, and (thirdly) was not based on lower fares. In order to sketch the general pattern of how oceanic transport technology influenced transatlantic migration, this paper makes use of the concentration of passenger flows during the steamship era. Most Europeans who emigrated overseas before the First World War ended up in the USA. 70% of U.S. immigrants between 1850 and 1914 arrived via the port of New York, in waves closely paralleling the total migratory influx to the U.S. Half of those migrants, and half of all passengers arriving by sea, travelled on the four largest steamlines: Britain's Cunard and White Star, and the two principal German firms, Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL), and the Hamburg-America Packet Company (HAPAG). These were the only broadly-based companies with sizable shares of the North Atlantic passenger traffic throughout the entire period. Their large, diverse fleets covered most major European and eastern U.S. ports. Their business volumes and growth strategies are broadly representative of the overall pattern of steamline development on the North Atlantic. Already by the early 19th century, migration was significant enough to compete with trade as a source of public revenue. When theU.S. Supreme Court ruled State "head" taxes on immigrants unconstitutional in 1849, the justices conceded that as a branch of commerce, the transportation of passengers had always given profitable employment to American ships, and in the past few years had required an amount of tonnage nearly equal to that of imported merchandise. [emphasis added]How large this "backhaul" of migrants was in comparison to (untaxed) exports was not mentioned, however, in 1907, passenger liners arriving at New York accounted for about 20% of net tonnage entered to the U.S.. By that time, most transatlantic freight was being carried in "tramp" vessels. Thus, if oceanic tonnage volume at U.S. ports was roughly 20% of the global total, that would imply that something less than 5% of the world's ship volume was devoted to oceanic migration between Europe and the U.S. However such an estimation would underrate the economic importance of transatlantic migration to global shipping. Capital costs, operating expenses, and revenues (especially in a migration boom year such as 1907) were clearly many times higher, per shipping ton, on a North Atlantic passenger liner than on a bulk freighter. The largest international shipping enterprise after the turn of the century was Germany's HAPAG. "The World is my Field" was its slogan and it carried freight and passengers on all seven seas. Measured by the number of round-trips or miles travelled, North Atlantic voyages accounted only about 10% of HAPAG's activity in 1910. However they comprised 30% of HAPAG's tonnage and generated nearly 60% of its passenger traffic. Most other transatlantic lines were more heavily concentrated on plying the sea lanes between Europe and North America. Throughout the period, the industry's largest and most expensive ships were consistently assigned to the North Atlantic. Those waters were the prime testing arena for a long series of significant changes in transport technology. The simultaneity of the transportation revolution and the trans-oceanic movement of migrants on an unprecedented scale, has prompted diverse theories about how the two may have been linked. A recurring refrain is that declining passage fares, analogously to falling freight rates, helped to make migration an economically rational option given wide wage disparities across the Atlantic labor markets. Another enduring notion is that steamlines exploited huddled masses, or, worse yet, actively deployed armies of agents in villages throughout Europe, to dupe gullible peasants with false promises, or to assist municipalities in the export of their "unwanted". An additional possibility, frequently implicit in the writings of migration historians today, is that that neither shipping nor migration were particularly important to the development of the other, once the conversion to steam was complete. None of these hypotheses stands up well to in-depth scrutiny. The supposition that migration was spurred by declines in the total cost of migration, including land travel, waiting time at ports, and in-transit risks, is plausible, although not yet well-substantiated. However, the theory that steamlines were part of this cost reduction, through a lowering of passage prices, rests on unrepresentative temporary price cuts contradicted by the general long term trend, which was one of little change. Britain's Inman line pioneered the carrying of transatlantic migrants on steamships in the mid-1850s. In contrast to the sailing ships carrying over 95% of transatlantic steerage passengers up until then, Inman offered individual berths for each passenger, three cooked meals per day, a separate compartment for women, towels and soap for washing, an on-board doctor, and a transit time one-half as long. After adding New York to its route roster in 1857, Inman quickly garnered the largest share of the migrant traffic to America, despite charging its steerage customers twice the fare levied by sailing ships. Notwithstanding solid reputations with business travellers, older steamlines were unable to immediately compete with Inman in the migrant travel segment, because Inman was also the first fleet with all-metal hulls and screw propellers. Those vessels were much more economical and energy efficient than the wooden paddlewheelers of lines such as Cunard, the first to offer regular transatlantic steam service. Of course, Inman inspired imitators. By 1870, over 90% of immigrants to America travelled on the iron-hulled screwships of a dozen steamlines. In the process of moving "down-market" from Inman's original clientele, the so-called "better class of emigrants", steerage prices declined from £ 8 to about £ 5. However, this was still at the high end of the £3-5 range typical on transatlantic sailing ships in the 1830s and '40s. Ten years later, after some cyclical ups and down in the 1870s, transatlantic migrants in the early 1880s were again paying slightly under £5 . With modest regional variation, that remained the average level for steerage or third class fares throughout the remainder of the pre-World War I era. For example, third class prices of Cunard's voyages to New York from Liverpool averaged £5 during the decade which ended in 1914. During the previous ten years, 1895-1904, the fares had averaged £ 4. Clearly, it was not a reduction in oceanic travel prices which generated a doubling of Cunard's steerage passengers on that route over that same 20 year span: from an average of 22 thousand annually during 1895-1904 to 38 thousand per annum during 1905-14. The periodic price wars which at times drove rates to below £2, did not alter the generally stable long term average of transatlantic fares. The price wars failed to stimulate migration even in the short term. Most episodes of fare-cutting occurred during cyclical downturns, which were associated with sharp drops in flow of job-seeking immigrants to America. There is little doubt that these immigrants were vulnerable to abuse, and that their well-being was rarely a top priority for shipping lines. A long litany of complaints and investigations substantiates this. However, it should be noted that the most flagrant scams occurred not on board ships, but in the ports at either end. Furthermore, most historians have credited the shift of migrant transport from sail to steam as the single event which most notably reduced the risks and hardships of the oceanic journey. Hypotheses of systematic price-gouging and abuse of migrants by shipping companies, after the conversion to steam, are difficult to reconcile with a concurrent absence of either strict barriers against new competitive entrants, or significant constraints on capacity increases by established lines, or noticeable slackening of the long term outpouring of new migrants. These flows were facilitated, but not instigated, by steamline agents, scholars have suggested. They point instead to advice, remittances, and pre-paid tickets of relatives as more powerful boosts to migration. The agents also had little ability to mitigate declines in migration during cyclical depressions. Indeed, the pattern of those migratory movements does not seem to have been linked to changes in shipping in any directly obvious way. North Atlantic steamship service and mass migration between Europe and North America had distinctly different origins. Once ocean-going steam travel became possible, thanks to the development of the marine engine and the surface condenser by the late 1830s, steamlines were established on the Atlantic, not to carry migrants but to deliver mail. The speed and punctuality of steamers contrasted with the earlier sailing packets whose transit time of a month or more was twice as long, and subject to the variability of wind and currents. Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands fleeing the Irish potato famine and the failed revolutions of central Europe travelled almost exclusively on sailing ships. The all-time high of American immigration relative to population occurred in 1854, sixteen years before White Star was organized, six years before Cunard started carrying steeragers, two years before the German lines began deploying steamships, and two years before Inman recalled its screwships from Crimean War service to begin the first noticeable transport of migrants by steamline. Subsequent developments do indicate a growing involvement of steamlines with migration after the 1850s: the replacement of exclusive fixed postal contracts with competitive per-piece arrangements in the early 1860s, completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable in the late 1860s, the liquidation of a large number of American sailing packets during the Civil War, and a sustained growth of European migration to the U.S. (from 80 thousand in 1861 to 400 thousand in the cyclical peak of 1873). However, a fuller understanding of the effects of steamship innovation upon migration requires a more systematic exposition of how the ships changed over time, and what that meant for travellers on board. 2. THE SWIFT DECLINE OF SAIL AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GIANT PASSENGER LINERS The success of steamships was based on three advantages over sailing vessels: more power (the marine engine instead of wind), increasingly efficient propulsion (initially through paddlewheels, and later, screw propellers), and stronger (metal) hulls designed so as to reduce friction. These advantages led to three benefits for migrants whose alternative was travel by sailing ship. Firstly, the steamers were faster, on average. The replacement of sail by steam cut transit times by two thirds, from about five weeks by sailing ship in the 1840s, to about 12 days by steamer in the late 1860s. Thereafter, more gradual increases in the speed of steamliners brought average transit times down to about 9 days by 1913. A second change was that metal hulls allowed much bigger ships to be built. This had several implications for migrant passengers which will be explored at some length below. Finally, and most crucially, metal-hulled screw-driven steamers were much safer. This was partly because they were bigger and therefore less liable to capsizing or to destruction in collisions, against which their greater strength was also an advantage. Lower risk for travellers was, more importantly, a consequence of the shorter passage time, which reduced the potential spreading of infectious diseases, the main source of deaths on board sailing ships. Steampowered travel reduced the death rates on the Atlantic crossing by 90%. Other health and safety advantages included the lower risks of en-route damage to propellers (versus sails or paddlewheels), of fires (and thus more hot meals), and of being swept off course. Steamships had one major and lingering disadvantage: their power source was neither as simple, as clean, nor as free, as the wind. Steamers required copious quantities of coal, large boilers and engines for converting it first to steam and then into motion, large bins in which to store it, and a small army of stokers to shovel it. This was the main reason for the endurance of sail in freight carriage, especially on the longer routes in the Southern Hemisphere, far from coal mines. Reducing energy needs was a chief priority not only for freighters but also on passenger vessels, even if, as noted above, the cost savings were passed on to customers in the form of greater speed, safety, and vessel size, rather than through lower fares. Marine engineers sought to cut coal consumption in several ways. More efficient propulsion was achieved by the conversion from paddles to screws and by the addition of further screws. Engines were designed with additional cylinders, and made able to operate at higher temperatures and pressures: getting more horsepower per unit of fuel. Experiments were also conducted to compare the energy required for various shapes and designs of ships and hulls. An examination of technical changes to North Atlantic passenger liners makes it plain that this was not a process of gradual diffusion and long-term coexistence of varying technologies. Once technical obstacles were overcome, each innovation was generally implemented immediately on all new ships. Out-of-date technologies persisted only because fleets could not be upgraded all at once: ships were costly to build, often had lives of ten or twenty years, and could not always be retrofitted to accommodate major innovations (which came roughly once per decade). Iron hulls and screw propellers were first introduced on the North Atlantic in 1850 by Inman: by the end of the decade almost all steamers arriving at New York were of that type. The two cylinder "compound engine" debuted in 1869. In 1873 they were already ubiquitous among the steamliners bringing steerage passengers to New York during that cyclical peak of immigration. The three cylinder "triple expansion" engine, the second ("twin") screw, and the steel hull were all first deployed on the North Atlantic in the early 1880s. By the early 1890s, they had been widely adopted by all four industry leaders (Cunard, White Star, NDL, HAPAG). The four cylinder, "quadruple expansion", engine appeared for the first time in 1893, by 1910 it was the norm on North Atlantic passenger liners. These improvements to engines, propulsion, and hulls had impacts on migration travel which fell into two phases. The first phase began with the swifter and safer, yet still affordable, regular steerage service on iron screwships, pioneered by Inman in 1856-57, and the emulation thereof by HAPAG (1856), NDL (1857), and Cunard (1860). That initial phase ended with the boom years of the early 1870s when Europeans immigrated to America in (then) record numbers, almost all of them crossing on iron-hulled steamships with compound engines and screw propellers. (Following the "Panic of 1873", there was then a five or six year lull in migration and technical innovation.) To reiterate, within little more than a decade, the crossing speed was tripled and mortality rates cut to a tenth of what they had been on sailing ships. The early steamers were also bigger than sailing vessels but, when allowance is made for the extra space required for engines and coal storage, only slightly bigger. The second phase of technical innovation began in the early 1880s, when migration boomed, steel hulls were introduced, and "twin screws" were adopted. Stronger and lighter hulls, and the safety margin afforded by a second propeller, obviated the need for "auxiliary" sails. That made possible the first appearance of the long, tall "express steamers" or "ocean greyhounds", a type of ship "which remains today, with enormous modernization, the standard oceanic liner." This phase concluded with the hiatus in migration caused by the outbreak of World War I. It was followed by the permanent end of American "open borders", and the gradual replacement of steamships by diesel-powered "motorships", in the mid-1920s. The evolution of steamship service between Europe and New York is charted in Table 1. The pattern after 1873 differed markedly from that of the initial phase when steamers took over migrant transport from sailing ships. Mortality had already been reduced to levels found on land by the 1870s, so there was little room for further improvement. The reduction in transit time was also much less significant after the 1870s. In their first decade and half, steamers cut three weeks off the average crossing time required by sailing time; Over the next 40 years, only about three further days were shaved off. The main effect of technical innovations in this latter phase was to increase the size of ships (shown in the table) and to improve their energy efficiency (not shown). Increased size and fuel efficiency had been engineering objectives all along, but were overshadowed initially by a focus on winning mail contracts with record-breaking transit times. The first generation of steamships in the 1840s were wooden paddlewheelers which looked more like early Mississippi riverboats than like the Queen Mary. Most of their on-board space was needed for engines and coal storage. (It was the energy efficiency of the iron screwship which first made it possible for Inman to offer migrants steerage berths at "only" double the fare of sailing packets). TABLE 1: PASSENGER STEAMERS ARRIVING AT NEW YORK FROM EUROPE --------- ALL LINES -------- CUNARD, WHITE STAR, HAPAG, NDL Averages weighted by voyages: Ship Ship # Arrivals Arrivals Vessel-Tons / Steam # Ship # per per per per Passenger Lines Arrivals Vessels line vessel line vessel Knots Tons Capacity 1863 11 191 47 17 4.1 29 4.1 10.9 2543 4.41873 17 649 134 38 4.8 62 5.9 12.2 3104 3.81881 22 957 44 711890 22 914 42 95 7.3 15.0 5100 4.21900 21 838 40 841913 26 1091 42 109 5.9 17.1 17700 8.1Annual % increase:(compounded rate)1863-1873: 4% 13% 8% 8% 4% 1% 2% -1%1873-1890: 3% 3% 1% 4% 2% 2% 5% 1%1890-1913: 2% 2% 0% 1% -2% 1% 13% 7% SOURCES: New York Commissioners of Emigration U.S. Bureau of Navigation Morton Allan Directory Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway To carry not just mail, but large numbers of passengers as well, the great need had been for more on-board space. The oft-cited dilemma for engineers was thus, whether to design bigger vessels or develop more efficient engines. Actually, the two possible approaches overlapped. Greater fuel efficiency was a highly desirable, if not essential, concomitant of bigger ships needing more power. At the same time, the main long term advantage of more efficient engines was the ability to build bigger ships, not faster ones. To appreciate this last point, it is useful to observe a central principle of marine engineering: the energy required increases less than proportionately with ship size, but more than proportionately with speed. Foregoing much of the possible increase in speed (in order to instead build bigger ships) also made sense from a marketing standpoint. With transit times as low as one-to-two weeks after the turn of the century, still further reductions in travel time had diminishing appeal to luxury class passengers and migrants alike. Steamlines could charge at most an extra 10% for their "express" service, not enough to compensate for the heavier coal usage andlarger engines of these "greyhounds" vis a vis "regular" liners. With the most of the gains from stronger hulls and more efficient energy use after 1870 being applied to the deployment of ever larger ships, the question naturally arises: What use was the additional space being put to ? There are three possible answers to this question which shall be considered in some detail. Because much of the increase in fuel efficiency derived from the adding of multiple cylinders, and in some cases multiple engines, one obvious possibility is that expanded machinery for driving the ships was taking up most of the increase in space. "Net tonnage" is a measure of how much space on a ship is available for the carrying of revenue-generating passengers and cargo. Most of transatlantic migration during the steamship era involved transport to America on British, German, and to a lesser extent after 1900, American lines.A comparison of the "net" versus "gross" tonnage of these three countries' commercial fleets indicates that, as ships grew larger, their revenue-generating sections grew almost as quickly: TABLE 2 Net / Gross Tonnage (%) World Gross: UK, Germany, Gross World UK, Germany, US US / World ('000s) 1894 64% 64% 70% 15,134 1897 64% 65% 71% 1900 62% 63% 70% 21,788 1903 62% 63% 70% 1913 60% 59% 65% 39,644 Of course, these figures include ships plying the Caribbean, the Baltic Sea, and the East Asian straits. However, a similar stability can be seen in the tonnage of ships deployed on the North Atlantic by Cunard, White Star, NDL, and HAPAG in three time periods: 1888-96, 1897-1902, 1903-08. Net tonnage for those vessels was 57%, 60%, and 55% of gross tonnage for the three respective time periods. It seems Clearly net tonnage available for revenue-generation on the North Atlantic grew almost as dramatically as gross tonnage (see Table 1)did. But how much of this expanded net tonnage was allocated to passenger transport ? That the passenger business remained dominant is not at issue. For instance, in 1912, a fairly "typical" migration year, about two thirds of the German lines' North Atlantic revenue came from passenger traffic. But was this an increase or decrease over previous years ? There are anecdotal suggestions of a trend towards increased freight usage after the 1890s. Lamar Cecil refers to the 1896 annual report of the then soon-to-be global leader HAPAG, which stated: ...We have recognized the timely necessity of no longer seeking to make migration the basis of our North American business. Without taking into account that 1896-97 was a cyclical low for American immigration, Cecil goes on to conclude that "HAPAG's judgment that the future lay with freight did not prove erroneous". The subsequent annual reports of the company suggest otherwise, at least up until World War I. Compared to 1896, the Hamburg line's total freight volume in 1910 was three and a half times higher, but the number of passengers carried grew four and a half fold. Available evidence suggests that this relative shift towards passengers was not atypical. Like NDL, White Star was considered a premiere passenger line (except for a brief flirtation with cattle transport in the 1880s, and for a few months after the 1912 Titanic sinking, when bookings declined). On Cunard's U.S. routes, freight declined from 23% of total roundtrip revenue in 1890-99 to 15% in 1900-14. The foregoing analysis indicates that the main thrust of technical change on North Atlantic liners between the 1870s and 1914 was to produce larger ships, that the resulting space available for freight and passengers grew by almost as much, and that most of increase was used for the latter. It remains to try to estimate how much of the expanded ship space "trickled down" to the lowly migrants. The turn-of-the-century Atlantic was, after all, the age of the "Grand Saloon": the rococo ballrooms, grand staircases, polished smokerooms, expansive promenades, and four-star restaurants accessible to passengers of the upper deck "cabins". The promulgation of luxury travel during this time depended "above all, on room, room, and more room". While detailed figures are difficult to come by, it is more than likely that expenditures on furnishings and crew devoted to the first class areas rose disproportionately, and that few migrants partook of such opulence. The concept of liners as giant floating palaces obviously had little to do with migrant transport. However, increases in sizeand comfort were not without effect on migratory travel. To what extent seasickness declined with ship size is unclear (probably not much) but having more deck space and fresh air certainly did not hurt. More significantly, there was a marked trend, beginning in the 1890s and accelerating after about 1905, in the provision of private "closed" berths in steerage. By 1914, 1/3 to 1/2 of the steerage accommodations on ships from Northern European ports were of this so-called "new steerage" variety, rather than the older, more crowded, noisy, odorous, and immodest open bunkrooms characteristic of "old steerage". Available deck plans suggest that "new steerage" also correlates with an increase in net tonnage per steerage passengers. The fastest growing segment of travel after 1900, however, was the second class or "second cabin". This was true on routes from southern as well as northern Europe. Second cabin also grew in terms of space per passenger (although probably not as much as first class), and a growing percentage of those passengers were migrants: see Table 3. There are numerous accounts suggesting that, in terms of food, ventilation, and space, per fare paid, second class was a much better bargain for the growing minority of migrants able to afford it. Some of these were "repeaters" returning from sojourns in the Old Country and enjoying the fruits of their first economic successes in America. Others were families or single women desiring greater privacy than was available in steerage (especially if it was the "old" or "open-berth" steerage). Suggestions that migrants mainly used second class in order to avoid debarment at U.S. entry ports are contradicted by the low incidence of exclusion (less than 1% of immigrants over the 1880-1914 period) relative to the migrant travel in second class (over 10% after 1907, according to table 3). The percentage of total passenger slots allocated to second class by Cunard, White Star, HAPAG, and NDL on their North Atlantic vessels rose from 5% during 1880-97 to 11% during 1898-1913. Companies ordered and deployed new ships with a growing percentage of second class berths because that "in-between" travel class was a good deal for them as well as for their customers. Fares in second cabin averaged about $40 (£8) compared with $25 (£5) in steerage (old or new) and $125 (£25) in first cabin. The second class thus attracted both an upper tier of migrants and a lower tier of tourists: groups with offsetting travel patterns. (Westward) migrant flows peaked in the Spring when the (mostly American) tourists were heading east to Europe for the summer. The growing eastward flow, after 1890, of migrants returning to Europe was concentrated in the second half of the year, when American tourists were again moving oppositely (back home). The enhancement to capacity utilization for steamlines able to fill the same second cabin berths in both directions, in both Spring and Fall, was considerable. By the early 1900s, North Atlantic liner shipping had shifted from using crude steerage holds to carry migrants west and freight east, to carrying migrants and non-migrants (tourists and business travellers) in more spacious and comfortable quarters in both directions. Undoubtedly this is one reason why migration became increasingly viewed less as a one-time ordeal and more as a repeatable form of low-cost, back-and-forth travel. table 3 3. THE EVOLUTION OF MIGRATION: FROM REFUGEES TO TRAVELLERS It would be an exaggeration to suggest that transatlantic steamlines deliberately set out to build ever bigger ships with the primary objective of providing more space for migrant travellers. It would be equally misleading to try to claim that migratory transport was not a crucial and integral element in business development strategies which relied heavily on the use of ongoing technological improvement to provide value to travelling customers of all sorts. The tenfold increase in ship size over the 1850-1914 period was probably most closely related to desires to attract the acclaim and pocket books of wealthy tourist and business classes. But migrants were also beneficiaries of less crowded and more private accommodations, larger dining rooms, and more deck space, in steerage. In addition, a growing percentage took advantage of an increased offering of moderately priced second cabin berths. These were tangible improvements which went at least part way towards addressing the frequent complaints of migrants, their lobbying organizations, independent investigators, and governmental inspectors. One might wonder why, as ships grew in size and sophistication, the transatlantic lines did not attempt to specialize, rather than pursue a variety of passengers. Why not concentrate on the elite cabin passengers without having to worry about the riff raff below decks ? Alternatively, why not eschew the heavy expense of pampering the upper classes in ostentatious luxury, and instead focus resources on reliably providing low-cost travel to migrants ? Available figures do not support notions that steamlines maintained a diversity of services primarily as a cyclical hedge: cabin, steerage, and freight volumes rose and fell more often in positive correlation than not. A more crucial distinction was where these various animate and inanimate revenue sources were housed. In a travel business whose primary cost consists of large increments of long-lived fixed capacity, maximizing the yield on those sunk costs is a prime objective. Modern airlines and cruise ships rely on price discrimination: so did their predecessors, steamlines. Higher decks with better views and fresher air could command higher prices not obtainable if only migrants had been solicited. Lady Astor and friends would not have travelled below deck, so that space would have been largely wasted if only luxury passengers had been targeted. But this begs the question; Why build such large and tall ships in the first place ? The marketing and cost advantages of size versus speed have already been explicated above. But why not build more ships rather than bigger ships ? A glance back at Table 1 (p.12) shows that up to 1873, steamlines did in fact concentrate more on increasing the number, rather than the size, of their passenger vessels arriving at the Port of New York. There are three reasons why the emphasis was reversed thereafter. Recall that transatlantic steamlines were first organized as carriers of mail, winning that business from sailing packets by their superior ability to guarantee regular delivery dates. There were, however, diminishing returns to the frequency of such service. Shipping literature is replete with references to the quantity of vessels of this or that technological generation needed by a given steamline desiring to offer "weekly service" to New York. Rarely was there much interest in going beyond weekly departure intervals. Before 1873, steamlines were still building fleets up to the level of once-per-week coverage. Modest improvements in speed thereafter reduced required vessel numbers; this was offset by a slight increase in the number of European ports connected by regular routes to New York. In theory, two or three small ships travelling in tandem might have offered greater flexibility of capacity deployment than one large, "indivisible" vessel. However, idling vessels in harbor during slack periods is hardly a costless proposition. Furthermore, although difficult to quantify, there is evidence of significant scale economies in construction costs, crews, and docking allocations, which favored deployment of fewer large ships rather than a greater quantity of lower-tonnage vessels. A final advantage of big ships was less tangible, but very real.Before air travel, television, or computers, the massive steampowered ocean greyhounds were technical wonders of their age. Kings and Presidents christened them, their arrivals were front page news, and crowds gathered in the tens of thousands to witness their arrivals and departures. A century hence, in the jaded cyber-world of today, the giant liners still have tremendous popular appeal. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that large modern, vessels, ideally with three or four huge, billowing smoke stacks, were preferred by migrants. Skepticism is not unwarranted here, but certainly safety was a concern to migrants, and sea disasters were much more common on the much smaller ships of the sailing and early steam eras. It is difficult to explain the confluence of risks taken in the design and operation of the Titanic, without reference to widely-held beliefs of "unsinkability". The attenuated attention to risk exposed by the Titanic's demise,underscores the degree to which technical improvements over the course of six decades of steamline service had transformed the Atlantic crossing. From an odyssey undertaken by intrepid pioneers or refugees in flight, transatlantic migration had become something more like the seasonal labor flows or rural-to-urban movements which grew with it and overlapped it. A reduced fear of disease and deprivation, more room to breath (or festively mingle), and a reduction in transit discomforts afforded by the provision of more spacious facilities for eating, sleeping, and washing, helped make a more widely-encountered and repeatable experience out of what had once been a rare adventure or last-resort ordeal. The use of gains in fuel efficiency, not to reduce prices, but to improve the quality of the travel experience, corroborates suggestions by Dudley Baines and others that the main reason for the increase in the rate of return to all [European] countries [after 1900] was the improvement in transport. Technological innovations used to build faster, safer, and ultimately much larger, ships were only part of a broader series of interactions between transportation and migration in the context of a gradually more and more interconnected "global economy". The 19th century transportation revolution, for instance, began on land. Railroads were particularly significant for overseas migrants because they facilitated links to and from port cities. Nevertheless, the growth of international migration was more closely connected with the revolutionary application of steam power to ocean travel. Trains carried daily commuters and other non-migrants not found on ships, whereas ocean liners were much more involved with migrant "traffic" over longer distances. Migrants within Europe or the U.S. used many travel modes, but most who crossed the ocean to America arrived on one of a handful large steamlines at one of the four largest Atlantic ports. Steamlines were larger, more concentrated, more international, and longer-lived corporate carriers of migrants than were railroads. On the Atlantic, causation also ran from migration to transportation. Most major transatlantic lines were founded in periods of high or rapidly growing migration, generally with steerage carriage a major concern, if not the primary objective. Steamline profits correlate closely with migration from Europe to the U.S., and it was during migration boom years that most of the capital investment in technical modernization took place. The rise of "return" and "repeat" migration helped North Atlantic lines achieve a better east-west balance as they endeavored to match high fixed cost capacity against volatile flows of transatlantic job-seekers. It also bears mentioning that travel innovation and mass migration did not interact in a political vacuum. Officially-sanctioned oppression (turn-of-the-century Russia) and neglect (mid-century Ireland) encouraged migration, as did the dismantling of barriers to emigration (after 1880 in Italy). What politicians created they could also destroy. The outbreak in 1914 of what became known as the "Great War", and the blockades, submarine attacks, passport controls, and immigration restrictions which followed, brought the "Great Migration" to an end by the early 1920s. In between, during 1850-1914, a series of laws passed in Britain, Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere, regulated and ameliorated travel conditions. The legislation paralleled measures of steamlines to improve ventilation, hygiene, food, and privacy, and to install innovations such as electric lighting, radio, and refrigeration. Finally, the contemporaneous efforts of those governments to build advanced naval fleets, promote exports, foster overseas colonization, and to stimulate their shipbuilding industries, also helped to further accelerate the pace of maritime modernization. The periodic governmental spotlight on the not inconsiderable problems and abuses of the Atlantic passage, have, however, encouraged a misleading impression that migration by steamship was an essentially exploitative business. Certainly the travel comfort of steerage passengers was infrequently foremost in the minds of shipping executives. Nonetheless, the crude and brutal maneuverings perpetrated by 18th century slave traders, crews of early 19th century canvas-rigged "coffin ships", or late 20th century "coyotes" can not accurately be conflated with the strategies employed by giant multinational travel intermediaries in the pre-World War I Atlantic labor market. A more valid parallel is with modern airlines, whose transatlantic flights today hark back to the ocean voyages they replaced, as their "cabin crews", introduced by the "captain", march "fore" and "aft" to welcome passengers "on-board". Investment in technological improvement and the efficient utilization of costly carrying capacity remain as critical in modern air travel as they were in transoceanic migration a century ago. However, mass migration is no longer a significant feature of such international transport, due to legal prohibitions. In today's converging global economy, continuing improvements to transportation, communication, and information transfer are having a greater effect on alternatives to large-scale cross-border migration, in large part because such migration cannot be freely, legally, and widely pursued as a technologically-driven travel business, as it was on the 19th century Atlantic. TABLE 4 THE EVOLUTION OF NORTH ATLANTIC LINERS, 1840-1914 Days to Passenger Capacity Line Vessel Hull Propulsion Engine New York 1st 2nd Steerage Cunard Brittania Wood Paddles Single 14 115 NDL Bremen Iron Screw Single 13 160 110 400 White Star Oceanic Iron Screw Compound 9 116 1000 Cunard Campania Steel Twin screw Triple Exp. 7 600 400 1000 HAPAG Vaterland Steel Quad screw Turbine 6 750 535 2386 Source: Bonsor - scale illustrations of J.H. 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