Abstract
This paper examines the potential role of commercial information in explaining the sudden acceleration of Atlantic migration from central Europe around 1880. Drawing on examples from German Europe, and new theoretical frameworks regarding decision making, it questions assumptions held in migration macro theory that have marginalized commercial information in motivating migration decisions. Specifically, it examines this issue at the onset stages of movement. In light of this discussion, it recognizes the advantages of examining commercial material in European archives, particularly those of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which may help advance historical knowledge of one of the major nineteenth-century shifts in Atlantic movement.
I
In the early 1880s, migration between Europe and the United States underwent a historic transformation. In the years 1880 to 1882, established migration systems between the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States reached or came close to absolute peaks in nineteenth-century volume.1 At the same time, new migration systems between central, southern, and eastern Europe and the United States suddenly appeared as large-scale, long-term phenomena. After 1882, the old systems steadily declined, while the new rapidly accelerated. For a number of reasons, scholarship of transatlantic migration rarely dwells on this watershed moment. Principal among these is the fact that migration studies often retain a state or ethnolinguistic focus. The focus on single groups often prevents the use of a wider lens that might analyze large-scale system changes. And even where large scale change has been analyzed, consensus is not always reached. In the analysis of “old” system decline and the advent of “new,” the explanation of decline enjoys the greater consensus. Historiography largely accepts that the full advent of industrialism at or near traditional emigration centers, and shrinking wage disparity between these regions and the United States, finally dampened migration potential.2 Scholars are divided, however, in explaining the onset of central, southern, and eastern European movement across the Atlantic.
Supported by economic data, structuralist approaches to the new phenomenon posit that while these regions harbored latent migratory potential throughout the nineteenth century, actual emigration lagged behind northwest Europe until it became an affordable strategy, late in the century.3 Network approaches to migration favor a different view. Highlighting the fact that central and eastern European migration streams typically and consistently find their geographic start point at linguistic borderlands with Germany, the network approach favors a “diffusionist” hypothesis, pointing to the spatial diffusion of chain migration networks over the continent.4 The functionalist view, on which the first two necessarily rely, is that migration became a reality when mass-movement became technologically possible—when transit systems and information brought by rail, telegraph, and steamship reached full maturity across Europe in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
Some of these conclusions are more easily upheld than others. The liquidity question regarding the affordability of migration from central and eastern Europe is problematic. A principal and well-proven aspect of networked migration is that successful migrants subsidized the emigration of their kin. Given the well-established familial and community relationships between early central European migrants and existing emigrant communities at German borderlands—which, for the Jewish case at least, meant that “[actual] pioneers were almost nowhere to be found”—the potential for subsidized migration undermines overreliance on local wage data when judging access to migration.5 Moreover, it is difficult to imagine migration becoming simultaneously affordable across multiple economies with such specificity. The diffusionist view therefore seems more logical.
A defining feature of mass migration from central and eastern Europe to the United States is that it began almost simultaneously across all ethnic groups along the German border, where linguistic heterogeneity prevailed. Although some precursory migration from ethnic minorities within the German Empire and Habsburg borderlands relates to the late 1860s and early 1870s, the onset of significant Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire, as well as major Polish, Magyar, Czech, Slovak, and Croatian migration from Austria-Hungary, finds a simultaneous beginning in the years 1880–82. There is an obvious geographic coherence to these developments, underpinned by the logic of human networks in migration, and their ability to motivate migration decisions.6 Social diffusion as a primary, sudden trigger to migration in these years might not be enough to explain events, however. Why might communities across such a broad front of central and eastern Europe respond so simultaneously to the opportunity of migration? Moreover, Italy did not share these links and yet found its own nascent beginnings in transatlantic movement in these years. Finally, migration was already diffused in the British Isles and Germany, which also experienced major peaks in emigration. The 1880–82 period represented a pan-European movement. Even if material circumstances in every single affected region generated migratory potential, and many communities had links to migrant networks, why was a sudden, pronounced, unitary response found in crossing the Atlantic Ocean?
The functionalist assumption regarding the opportunities of mass transit provides a potentially interesting avenue of research: that of commercial information. The one contemporary enterprise with pan-European influence was Atlantic passenger shipping and its attendant industries in advertising, recruitment, and inland transit.7 This paper will examine the potential for commercial information to simultaneously stimulate migration across wide, multilingual regions of Europe. It considers the relative potential for socially diffused and commercially diffused information to motivate migration decisions at different points in the development of migration systems, and it cautions against implicit biases toward social information. Because the relevance of socially diffused information in migration has been supported by studying mature, rather than nascent systems, it argues for a reappraisal of the role of commercial information in the onset of movements. It does so by appealing to a developing literature that allows the migration historian to be cognizant of human decision-making biases not well represented by migration theory, but which may help explain the onset of emigration from central and eastern Europe, and inform future research.
The paper initially examines the predisposing conditions to Atlantic migration in the territories of the Habsburg/dual monarchy leading up to 1880, and it suggests that commercial activity was poised, by the late 1870s, to exert a precipitating influence on those conditions. It then explores historiographical discussion on the issue, which typically casts commercial information and activity in the role of facilitator to migration, rather than decision-making influencer. Citing existing literature that has closely examined the steam shipping industry, and recent developments in migration theory, the paper then suggests that this position be reconsidered. It concludes by suggesting further research into social and commercial connections between the commerce of Atlantic migration and areas of initial diffusion in central and eastern Europe, particularly during the transition from the 1870s to early 1880s, where information diffusion may enhance the understanding of initial emigration flows.
II
In order to assess the acceleration of central and eastern European migration from 1880 and the potential role of commercial information in that development, initial context must be given to the geographic, social, and logistical factors that predisposed emigration prior to that point. These factors begin in German Europe, to which emigration from each of the major central and eastern European groups is intricately tied. Within the German Confederation, consistent Atlantic movement from regions east of the Elbe began with the subsistence crisis of 1846/7, drawing from Mecklenburg, where emigrants were stimulated by settler society advertisements for Texas.8 In the early 1850s, emigration from Mecklenburg became more substantial, helped significantly by the spread of agents from the new Hamburg America Line [HAPAG] into the immediate eastern hinterland of the Elbe River. From Mecklenburg, emigration then moved into Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Posen, eventually reaching Breslau and East and West Prussia. The acceleration of the east-Elbian movement into Breslau, and into East and West Prussia in particular, began to draw ethnic minorities into the German system, with Polish migrants beginning to feature from 1866.9 With freedom of emigration granted in the dual monarchy in 1867, emigrant networks could then extend across imperial borderlands, initially incorporating Bohemia and Polish Galicia. Crop failures in Galician Poland in 1876 caused an increase in departures, with nascent emigration also beginning to reach Slovak minorities at Czech and Polish borderlands.10 From this point, East Prussia and Galicia appear to have acted as critical hinges in the next stage of diffusion. Polish Jewish migration began to occur around 1880 at the East Prussian border.11 From counties bordering the southern edge of Galicia, and connected to both Saxon and Slovak communities, migration from northern Hungary began in 1880.12 Within Hungary, Atlantic migration then spread south to the Croatian districts of Zagreb and Fiume, as well as other regions on the southern fringe.13
The clear majority of these migrations were channeled through the German ports of Bremen and Hamburg, and their respective Atlantic carriers, North German Lloyd and HAPAG.14 In the 1870s, both HAPAG and Lloyd had clear incentives to stimulate central European migration. Emigration from Germany, after almost a decade of high volume following the American Civil War, collapsed with the recession of 1873. Both companies had extensively expanded their steamship fleets during that period, adding eight vessels each. HAPAG had also ordered four further vessels employing new compound engine technology during the mid-1870s, and Lloyd, not to be outcompeted, had had three vessels expensively refitted with the same technology in 1877–78.15 The vessels represented enormous outlays and, without sufficient emigrant traffic, huge fixed costs.16 Both firms were dependent on a substantial flow of migrant traffic to service these costs, let alone make profits. It was in the interest of both firms to stimulate new markets for emigration in order to service the heavy costs of their fixed assets and continue to make a profit for their stakeholders. Perhaps not coincidentally, differing correspondences with Bremen and Hamburg authorities show that emigrant recruitment in North Hungary was already intensive in the 1870s.17 During the mid-1870s, Polish and Austrian authorities also began to note the presence of emigration agents in Polish-speaking, non-Prussian communities.18 As early as 1880, an American consul in Budapest argued that “Slovak peasants emigrated mostly because of unscrupulous agents, who are managing their business a good deal in the manner of the coolie trade.”19 Increases in recruitment activity appear to have been so great that the solicitation of emigration through the circulation of books, brochures, pamphlets, and any advertising was banned under an imperial edict of 1881.20
Along with the appearance of nascent emigrant networks, recruiters in central and eastern European borderlands, and the incentive of the primary emigrant ports to capture new markets, by 1878, each major urban center of the dual monarchy was connected to the German rail system, allowing migrants to access ports of embarkation from across the empire.21 When incorporating the obvious utility factor of income disparity, on the eve of the 1880s, conditions heavily favored the onset of American emigration from central and eastern Europe. Among these factors, some precipitating influence tipped the balance of emigration from latent potential into a “mass departure that was sudden and unexpected,” described by contemporaries as “a contagious “fever” that infected entire villages.”22
On the European side, there was no obvious material trigger in the regions considered, other than pogrom activity in the Russian Empire, which, as shown elsewhere, appears to lack a causal connection.23 Structurally, two other issues could exert a macro-level effect on European emigration, giving existing networks a disproportionate pull. Growth in the American economy is the first. After a long depression between 1873 and 1878, marked by a collapse in rail construction, American recovery began in 1878–79, first in the rail sector, and thereafter in general construction. This could exert a Europe-wide pull, both in well-established and nascent migrant networks. Second, at the time of this upswing in the American economy, the Atlantic passenger industry was able to capitalize on a fully integrated European transit system to channel migration potential toward the dominant shippers and ports of embarkation. From both sides of the Atlantic, it is clear that up to and including the surge of migration from 1880, migrant recruitment activity had been significantly increasing. A critical question is whether that recruitment simply facilitated an upswing in migration that would have naturally occurred or helped actively stimulate it.
Recruiters were conduits of information about migration opportunity, connecting migrants in the European interior to passage opportunities at port, and ultimately to America. Clearly, contemporary authorities believed that such recruiters were responsible for stimulating emigration, leading to the ban on advertising material of 1881. As has been extensively argued elsewhere, the reaction of imperial authorities was a manifestation of population policy. Recruiters were deeply disliked by mercantilist European rulers who saw their populations as the main component of both economic wealth and military prowess. Migration agents were cast in the role of nefarious “slave-drivers” by imperial authorities of the Austrian and Hungarian monarchies, campaigns against them—often anti-Semitic—were common in the contemporary press, as well as against their physical activities.24 And while not all contemporary viewers believed emigration agents were necessarily malevolent, their influence in motivating migration was consistently claimed. In 1890, an American commissioner investigating the matter concluded that “while I cannot say that the steamboat companies use unfair or undue influences … there is no doubt to my mind that to some extent in all countries visited by me, and to a very large extent in Italy, immigration to the United States is invited by the competitive efforts of steamboat agents.”25 Moreover, the steamship companies “tried to serve the interests of the emigrants, but they had a conforming influence on the emigrants' move to the New World. They may not often have misused their power, but the power was there.”26
Historians are less convinced of this influence. A common consensus holds that “the most important pull factor was the report[ing] sent back by earlier emigrants … people did not just start off at the enticement of unknown emigration agents or newspaper articles, but only on the strength of known examples or of reliable personal information.”27 This presents a conundrum for sudden surges in early migration systems, however. When migration growth is not lineal, but suddenly accelerates, diffusion has clearly acquired a catalyst. The ability of immature networks reporting positive growth in the American economy to provide such a catalyst is a possible but not necessarily practicable explanation, given the logistical and commercial requirements in suddenly escalating migration. As arbiters of both access to and information about American migration, steam shipping firms and their agents could have exploited various conditions to act as a unifying catalyst and influence on the onset of mass Atlantic migration from central Europe. For many reasons, however, existing historiography casts commercial activity and information only in the role of facilitator—albeit one of critical importance—assisting migration decisions that had already been made.
This assessment has been influenced by the lineage of approach to Atlantic migration history. Of critical importance is the social turn in migration history that has shaped the field since the 1960s and 1970s. In reclaiming ethnocultural identities from the suppositions of America's “melting pot,” migration historians of the civil-rights era discovered and codified the extent to which migration decisions were the product of coherent social networks. Rather than being faceless, structurally determined generic Europeans, refashioned upon arrival into white America, historians revealed that American immigrants were the agents of culturally, socially, and locally specific migration networks, produced and maintained by the migrants themselves, which in turn shaped migrant experience and identity.28
Those networks allowed and encouraged individuals to move between communities of kin where successful predecessors could provide the information, employment opportunities, and knowledge to stimulate migration. The idea that migration systems were the product of networked, transnational communities was then systematically corroborated by the Uppsala project on Scandinavian migration.29 Subsequent reconstitutions of community departure and settlement have continually reinforced the validity of the network-based approach to understanding historical migration.30 Repeatedly, migration decisions, as demonstrated by migrant letter studies and patterns of departure and settlement, appear as the product of information flows between migrants themselves. In unlocking this network-based dynamic, historians have been critical to demonstrating the extent to which international migration is driven by social capital and human networks as much as structural context.31
The historiography of Atlantic migration, irrespective of region of study, thus generally holds that “steamship agents and advertising were not crucial forces behind transatlantic migration … instead … networks of kinship and community, letters, prepaid fares, ships and schedules hitched European labor to American jobs.”32 “Agents should be seen as mediators and facilitators, who eased the process of emigration, but [who] could do little more than promote “migration where a predisposition already existed”, or where “a firm decision to migrate” had already been made.33 The principal role they played was logistic, connecting (already convinced) migrants to the transit routes and ports that would get them to America. Crucially, they became expert in navigating (and circumventing) the regulatory impositions of imperial authorities, which prevented the travel of males who had not conducted military service, or the border crossings of those without valid shipping tickets, in order to make migration a practical reality for as many customers as possible.34 And while this facilitating role is seen as critical, especially in the late nineteenth century as state attempts to inhibit migration became more vigorous, ultimately it was “clearly not emigration agents who stimulated emigration, but barriers to mobility that stimulated a demand for emigration agents.”35 This consensus suggests that advertising information and literature, produced extensively by ships' brokers and agencies, and circulated by agents themselves, was effectively inert. The actionable information on which migration decisions were made was the exclusive preserve of friends and kin.
There are analytical consequences, however, to working with the primary assumptions of network theory and social capital when explaining migration. First, these criteria are adept at explaining mature migration systems, because they are observations derived from studying mature migration systems. They are less suited to understanding how migration might begin or spread from either relatively or totally unprecedented circumstances. Moreover, because of the proven validity of socially derived information within established systems, an analytical bias toward the value of such information prevails when assessing migration decisions. Consequently, migration historians are less adept at explaining the role of information—and its sources—during the establishment of migration systems, and how potential migrants deal with unprecedented information.
Those who have specifically studied migrant recruitment have highlighted this bias. Feys concludes that “because of the stress on information flows from family and kin, the role of migration agents has been downplayed by migration historians,” but, significantly, “no-one has yet produced any direct evidence to refute the claims” of contemporaries that recruiter information stimulated emigration.36 Simply put, the stance that commercial information played an ineffective role in migration decisions comes from the assumptions of existing theory, not focused study. Historians who have studied recruitment activity have shown a greater openness to the possibility of information influences outside of social networks, especially in the inaugural stages of emigration.37 This is logical, for a number of reasons. Information flows during the inaugural stages of emigration are poor in relation to later stages, and there is little precedent or existing stock of knowledge against which the messages of recruiters can be assessed. The simple disproportion of commercial information to social information suggests a potentially greater role for the former. Accepting a role for commercial information in stimulating early migration movements, however, requires tacit acceptance that migrants were susceptible to nonendogenous influences in decision making. Because this remains largely incongruent with the historiographical consensus, the remainder of this paper will explore two key issues that support the influence of commercial information flows in the early stages of emigration. It will explore first the decision-making biases and the conditions in which migration decisions are made, and second the blurred lines between migrant networks and recruiting networks.
III
Other than the paradigms offered by existing historical migration study, it is unclear why advertising, solicitation, and general commercial information cannot have motivated migration decisions. Although migration history agrees that migrants typically acted on trusted, reliable information received from local kin and contacts, a growing literature recognizes the extent to which migrants will act on imperfect or even incorrect information, especially at the early stages of movement.38 These observations do not deny migrants agency in their actions—something that historians and network theory in particular have invested in—but recognize that an element of agency is the choice to ignore information that contradicts a person's desired aims or goals. Essentially, migrants can choose to ignore good information in favor of bad, if it helps them commit to a desired action. In periods when migration information was poor and populated more substantially by external sources than internal, information that accorded with desired lifescapes, irrespective of sources, could find a willing audience. In the early stages of any migration process, and potentially in central and eastern Europe, commercial agents and the shipping interests that they represented could provide information that encouraged such confirmation bias. Put another way, there is no reason to believe that migrants would discount what was written in pamphleteering or travel guides or a new migrant brokerage because it did not come from a trusted source, if such sources said things that migrants wanted to hear.
At the beginning of migration systems, it is possible that the asymmetry of information may encourage these dynamics. Where migration pathways were understood by early Polish, Slovak, Magyar, and Czech recruiters, the relative lack of knowledge about Atlantic pathways, risks, and opportunities in rural communities represented a market for those recruiters. As O'Reilly suggests, “for every increase in knowledge … there is a proportional growth in perceived ignorance.”39 Recruiters knew which local difficulties to offset against potential improvements in America, as well as demonstrating the ease with which America could be reached, and their early audiences had little precedent against which to assess such information. Without the well-diffused knowledge and word of mouth extant in a mature migration system, early-stage migrants “were pushed to weigh that which they knew against that which they did not know and, even more, against error and intuition.”40 In these conditions, “men and women came to deny both the known and the unknown in order to commit to a decision to migrate—often against instinct, logic and advice.”41 In this reading, in the very expression of their agency, migrants need not be the rational actors of economic theory but simply human decision makers, choosing to process the information that best supported their preferred actions. This was perfectly understood by exasperated nineteenth-century authorities who attempted to dissuade migrants from leaving.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, royal authorities in Württemberg were utterly perplexed by their inability to make migrants see sense when a “fever” of emigration spread in the lower Neckar Valley. “They believe,” claimed one official, “that our warnings are simply a contrivance of the government to prevent emigration injurious to the country; and the clearer and more specific the difficulties involved in their project are made to them, the more suspicious they become and the less they believe.”42 In a separate village, another official attempted to discourage a migrant from the potential offers of indentured service in America, by using a typical refrain that the migrant would “be enslaved.” He was met with the stinging retort from the emigrant in question that “I would rather be a slave in America, than a citizen in Weinsberg.”43 At the other end of the nineteenth century, an imperial Austrian consul, attempting to prevent a shipload of prostitutes from seeking work in an Ottoman brothel, found that the women resisted all efforts to “save” them with a return ticket and financial support.44 They declared that if repatriated by force, they would return at the first opportunity, leaving the official to confess that perhaps there was more to migration than “tales of slavery.”45 Throughout the nineteenth century, state bureaucrats consistently found that negative conjecture was no counterweight to an emigrant's current negative experiences. Migrants could not be dissuaded from exchanging the known misery of “here” by evoking the unknown misery of “there.” Yet positive conjecture—the potential to exchange known difficulties for unknown benefits—exerted an opposite effect. Recruiters and pamphleteers understood this.
Examples of this have been well-studied in the history of the Atlantic world. In 1709, a major emigration episode took place from the Palatinate and bordering areas of the Upper Rhine to Colonial America. The Upper Rhine region had some precedent of American emigration, in the form of religious dissenters who had moved in the 1690s, following earlier, more northerly recruits of William Penn. However, while an awareness of America existed, popular migration did not, despite the fact the Palatine region was in a position of chronic distress on account of imperial warfare with France and a succession of cold winters. In 1709, an advertising pamphlet written on behalf of the proprietors of Carolina was circulated in the region, generating the false belief in free land and transport to America. Thirteen thousand individuals suddenly embarked for London expecting shipment across the Atlantic. Testimony given by the migrants of this episode is highly revealing. In one district, none of the migrants questioned reported that they had heard of the emigration and Queen Anne's promises more than three weeks before their departure; several had heard of it only in the past week, and one man reported that he had heard of it only the day before.46 Christian Schneider stated only “that everyone was talking of moving to America, and that he had resolved to join them.”47 Shortly after the 1709 event, durable migration chains between the German Southwest and America began to function, where prior to it, despite structurally favorable conditions and nascent contact, they had not. Only with belief of suddenly available access did migration decisions cascade into a major surge: access information was trigger information. It did not matter to the migrants involved that they could not corroborate information that, ultimately, proved to be incorrect.48
Such information cascades or “herd effects” in migration have been highlighted as critical factors in generating migration, because the social reproduction of information can encourage departure, even where information is incorrect and more certain information is known.49 As Epstein has highlighted, when presented with imperfect information about a migratory destination, it is difficult to know which decision-making rule should be adopted, and the answer is heavily influenced by whether or not it can be observed that other people, who are like you, have recently been favoring a particular location.50 In this context, information—correct or otherwise—is corroborated by group reinforcement at the point of departure rather than between origin and destination. Such effects were clearly evident in both the 1709 and 1816/17 episodes that established eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patterns of German-Atlantic migration. Migrants can selectively assimilate information based on a social precedent, increasing group confidence to act on that information. In the same vein, Epstein has also highlighted the effect that knowledge of existing ethnolinguistic networks and precedent can have in encouraging migration among individuals unconnected to that network—meaning that networks have a stimulating effect in the formation of novel migration, simply through social precedent.51 As Puskás states, “it is no coincidence that the networks recruiting emigrants were the strongest and most able to lure people to emigrate, in those areas where reference could be made to successful local instances of emigration.”52
These dynamics could also be encouraged by the fact that social and commercial sources of information about migration were not mutually exclusive. Return migrants acting as recruiters were among the individuals best placed to spread information about extant, growing migration movements to areas in which migration might be a novel strategy. It is widely recognized that recruiters were individuals who could move fluidly between contexts. Return migrants had experience of America, could talk credibly about migration, existing precedent, the opportunities it presented, and pathways to achieving it. Indeed, the Holland America Line (HAL) pointed out that a key asset for agents was “knowledge of living conditions in the US.”53 This is an area of obvious conflict in existing assumptions about the effects of migrant recruitment. While on the one hand arguing that emigrant networks, not emigration agents, stimulated migration, it is widely recognized that emigration agents were migrants within the network. Social and commercial networks were intertwined, as Feys describes:
Agents were often migrants travelling back home to convince fellow countrymen to emigrate. Also known as ‘Newlanders’ or ‘Yankees,’ they negotiated special passage rates for their recruits with migrant brokers or directly with shipping companies. Able to provide first-hand testimony about conditions in the US and to serve as guides during the journey, these recruiters reduced the uncertainty of the move.54
Lines between social and commercial influence were blurred not only on the ground among recruiters, but right across the entire migration system. Immigrant bankers in the United States played a key role in tying together network logistics, serving as a one-stop shop for integration into the migration process. As well as handling immigrant finances, serving as credit brokers, being labor agents, and providing legal representation, a central and defining function of their business was to coordinate and book prepaid transatlantic tickets for the relatives of their customers.56 By 1872, the immigrant brokered prepaid market for British shipping lines had become so crowded that a cartel or “conference” was organized by the principal steam shipping firms to gain control of the market; by 1885, in response to British efforts and the flourishing informal brokerage by central and eastern European migrants, the continental lines organized their own effort to control the prepaid market in the same way.57
The prepaid market was clearly a direct example of commerce being able to make migration decisions on people's behalf—agents in the United States conducted the same business as those in Europe, but instead of canvassing emigrants they canvassed immigrants and their newfound access to American wages. Clearly the activity of these agents directly stimulated rather than facilitated European migration. However, the effect of the prepaid market on migration actions, and potentially decisions, also had a wider effect. A standard practice surrounding the prepaid market saw a small group of people join the owner of a prepaid fare on the journey to port. At the German border, the agents provided the ticket carrier's colleagues with their own tickets, thus allowing them to access the ports and the vessel of their (or the agents) choice.58 This practice is a direct example of social confidence at the point of departure. In these instances, one piece of information was a clear known: the owner of the prepaid ticket would be traveling through the agent and transit system that led to port. Local recruiting agents on the ground could both draw attention to the fact that others might hitch successfully to this journey and provide the information to do so. The prepaid was an access signal to those interested in migration but who may not yet have crossed the decision-making threshold associated with migration risks.
The agent system also involved positive feedback loops that were fully cognizant of blurring the lines between commercial and social information. A typical kind of recruitment was the forwarding of letters to remaining friends and family in the homeland that thanked and praised the services of an organizing agent.59 These letters were critical in helping explain the logistics of travel and the care and organization that made the process straightforward and navigable. Such representations of ease of access must be considered in others crossing the decision thresholds. But the letters were written by the travel agents in the port city and simply signed by the migrant before being sent back home.60 In this instance, commerce capitalized on social networks to legitimate its own information. Prepaids, letter information, and the agent network—especially where agents were former migrants—demonstrate the extent to which social networks and commercial enterprise were entirely blurred. And while the conscious blurring of commercial intent with social legitimacy is recognition that the latter was critical to persuading migrants to leave, the process was ultimately a commercial method, with very nuanced means, to stimulate migration. During the early stages of migration, before private correspondence was mature, the power of this system to generate migration must be seriously considered.
IV
Any assessment of the role of commercial information in stimulating migration cannot view such information as a substitute to structural conditions that made migration a favorable strategy, or the social networks that are fundamental to migrant systems. As Spitzer demonstrates, mass migration from eastern Europe cannot be understood without reference to spatial diffusion of migration networks.61 But there can be a pivotal space for commercial activity and information in helping stimulate migration, especially in its early stages. The role of commercial information in Atlantic migration from central Europe should be reexamined, if not rehabilitated, not least because scholarship does not yet fully account for the epochal shift in European emigration that took place around 1880, but also because decision-making scholarship has evolved significantly since network primacies in migration were codified.
In all stages of emigration movements, the lines between socially and commercially diffused information or solicitation to emigrate are incredibly blurred. At the outset of migration movements, this blurring may have had a pronounced ability to stimulate movement. Recent migration scholarship acknowledges that ethnolinguistic provenance, rather than personal relationships, can lend sufficient credibility to migration information for it to be actionable, and that information can and was acted on with selective bias in order to reach a migration decision. Even where information was incorrect, disingenuous, or was not learned firsthand, migrants could—and did—selectively interpret information in order to support desired actions. Such selective biases were an expression of human agency. Whether reacting to pamphlets, booklets, or public oratory, migrants could choose to believe positive advertising and solicitation about life in America while choosing to ignore the risks and negative information circulated by others, and by their own conscience. Such effects are likely to have been pronounced under conditions of asymmetric knowledge.
The relative “nonknowledge” of a community could allow a migration strategy to grow because those with knowledge could conceal risk and provide tangible signals about access. Such asymmetric conditions, layered atop structural socioeconomic stressors, offer intriguing conditions for the onset of new migration systems. As Epstein suggests, “informational cascades—herd behaviour—help us to understand the creation of the critical mass that creates network externalities.”62 Put another way, “to the extent that agents played a greater role in encouraging earlier ‘pioneer’ migrants, many links in the subsequent ‘chains’ of followers may in some sense be attributable to a relatively small number of initial recruitments.”63 At the opening stages of a migration system, information flows may not constitute knowledge but simply signals that both accord with desired actions and provide the confidence to act on those desires. The testimony of German migrants during surges of Atlantic migration from that region corroborates this dynamic. For that region of Europe, it is clear that where a small local precedent existed, access information could trigger major surges where initial network externalities were otherwise anemic and ineffectual.
Until now, the historiography of recruitment activity and commercial information in the central and eastern European Atlantic system has focused on the “hermetically sealed” “migration corridor” cultivated by HAPAG and Lloyd between the mid-1880s and the turn of the nineteenth century. It has rightly demonstrated the extent to which the logistical power exerted by the system was crucial to volumes of central and eastern European migration, and it has examined each component of those logistics closely, be it the conference or cartel arrangements for organizing agents, coordination of the inland transit system bringing migrants to port, boarding and quarantine of trans-migrants, or the politics of border management.64 Each of these studies—as migration history tends toward—focuses on a mature system that left a large trail of evidence. In light of the arguments covered above, it will be beneficial to examine the central and eastern European migrant recruitment system in the 1870s and its early, nascent ties to HAPAG and Lloyd. In particular, a focus on what information was circulated where and when at the onset of mass migration will be of significant value. During the 1870s, the outlay on new vessels by HAPAG and Lloyd meant they suffered not only relative outward overcapacity but also an even more pronounced overcapacity on the return leg, leading to a rate drop in eastbound Atlantic voyages. In central and eastern Europe, where seasonal migration was widespread, were agents able to sell the possibility of cheap return migration, thereby lowering the risk prospect of failed migration?65 Did specific pamphleteering about a specific area of settlement stimulate emigration, as had been the case for the Westphalians?66 Was it as simple as the establishment of brokerages in strategic positions that tied together the advantages of the rising American economy and general steamship overcapacity?
Where emigration diffused into new localities (as opposed to spreading in those where it already existed), the field would profit from a better understanding of what information or literature became available in those localities, by whom it was conveyed, and how it offered to connect migrants to the Atlantic world. Analyzed in conjunction with migrant volumes, this can inform historians of how migrants did (or did not) react to the information available to them and provide a better understanding of the convergent forces that initiated a major system. Historians have shown that ample information exists in the archives of regional authorities in the dual monarchy—in the form of newspapers and material apprehended from recruiters themselves—to give such questions appropriate scrutiny.67 Where such material has previously been used to help understand the mentality of the state during nascent stages of movement, it may also contribute to a better understanding of the mentality of the pioneer migrant. By exploring forces outside of network externalities, historians of central and eastern European migration may be able to further advance historical knowledge of the onset of a major system, and also advance methodological assumptions in migration study. Without an exploration of this factor, the history of a transformative era in migration between Europe and America will continue to harbor a fascinating lacuna.
Footnotes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “New Perspectives on Central European and Transatlantic Migration, 1800-2000” conference, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, March 8-10, 2018, in Budapest, Hungary.
1882 was the highest year of US immigration in the nineteenth century, with 788,992 recorded immigrants; 1882 combined with either 1881 or 1883 also provides the highest 2-year total of any period in the nineteenth century, being 1,458,423 for the years 1881–82, or 1,392,314 for the period 1882–83. The figures for 1880 or 1884 are half that of 1882; by comparison, US immigrant numbers at the height of the Irish Famine and broader European subsistence crisis of 1845–54 did not exceed 427,833 in any given year. Migration Policy Institute, “Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820–2015,” https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents.
See Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “What Drove the Mass Migrations from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Population and Development Review 20, no. 3 (1994): 533–99.
Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Specific examples are explored in Yannay Spitzer, “Pogroms, Networks and Migration, the Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States, 1881–1914,” working paper, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015; as a general concept, John D. Gould, “European Inter-Continental Emigration: The Role of Diffusion and Feedback,” Journal of European Economic History 9, no. 2 (1980): 267–317; also Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); also Simone Wegge, “Chain Migration and Information Networks: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 4 (1998): 957–86.
Spitzer, “Pogroms,” 5.
Spitzer's examination of Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire shows a movement that diffused from the Prussian border around 1880–82, in geographic isolation from the pogroms of that period. Only later, when networks had spread south and east, did pogrom activity around 1900 cause affected communities to become involved in emigration. See mapping by Spitzer, “Pogroms,” 65–68.
Although this paper focuses on central and eastern Europe, other historians have also noted that the onset of Italian emigration coincided with shipping interests and recruitment; Marco Soresina, ‘Italian emigration policy during the great migration age, 1888-1919: the interaction of emigration and foreign policy’ in Journal of Modern Italian Studies 21 (2016): 726.
Axel Lubinski, Entlassen aus dem Untertanenverband: Die Amerika-Auswanderung aus Mecklenburg-Strelitz im 19. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1997).
Mariusz M. Brymora, ed., 400 Years of Polish Immigrants in America, 1608–2008 (Washington, DC: Galeria Polskiej Książki, 2008), 8–9.
Andrzej Pilch, “Migrations of the Galician Populace,” in Employment-Seeking Emigrations of Poles Worldwide, ed. Celina Bobińska and Andrzej Pilch, trans. Danuta E. Żukowska (Cracow: Jagiellońskiego, 1973), 88.
See imagery in Spitzer, “Pogroms,” 65–66.
Julianna Puskás, From Hungary to the United States, 1880–1914 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), 56–60. On geographic origins, see also Annemarie Steidl, “The ‘Relatives and Friends Effect’: Migration Networks of Transatlantic Migrants from the Late Habsburg Monarchy,” in Maritime Transport and Migration: The Connection Between Maritime and Migration Networks, ed. Torsten Feys, Lewis R. Fischer, Stéphane Hoste, and Stephan Vanfraechem (St. Johns, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2007), 75–96.
Ibid.
Among Continental (i.e., non-British) lines, Lloyd (Bremen) took 46.16% of passengers, HAPAG (Hamburg) 28.84%, the Red Star Line (Antwerp) 15.7%, and Holland Amerika Line (Rotterdam) 9.3% between 1881 and 1891. Michael Just, “Preisabsprachen und Kartelle der Schiffahrtsgesellchaften,” in Auswanderung und Schiffahrtsinteressen: Little Germanies in New York, deutsche-amerikanische Gesellschaften, ed. Michael Just, Agnes Bretting, and Hartmut Bickelmann (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 48. Across the entire period 1870–1900, of an estimated 1,840,106 total Austro-Hungarian emigrants, 1,282,329 left through German ports, 367,409 through Dutch and Belgian ports, 142,918 through French, Italian, and Hungarian ports (Fiume) and 47,450 through Trieste. Pilch, “Migrations of the Galician Populace,” 88.
C. R. Vernon Gibbs, Passenger Liners of the Western Ocean (London: Staples, 1957), 170, 177.
Drew Keeling, The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the United States, 1900–1914 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012), 48.
Michael Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung, 1881–1914: Transitprobleme in Deutschland und Aufnahme in den Vereinigten Staaten (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988), 46.
Pilch, “Migrations of the Galician Populce,” 89. Celina Bobińska dates recruitment in Congress Poland to 1876; in Bobińska and Pilch, Employment-Seeking Emigrations, 42.
Tara Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial,” in Past and Present 223 (May 2014): 175.
Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung, 46. This edict strengthened an earlier act of 1867 and was again reinforced in 1903.
Max-Stephan Schulze and Nikolaus Wolf, “Economic Nationalism and Economic Integration: The Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th Century,” in The Economic History Review 65, no. 2 (2012): 659.
Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 25.
See above, note 6.
Zahra, Great Departure, 45–48; Katalin Stráner, “Emigration Agents and the Agency of the Urban Press: Approaches to Transatlantic Migration in Hungary, 1880s–1914,” in Journal of Migration History 2, no. 1 (2016): 352–74.
Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung, 317.
Ibid.
Puskás, From Hungary to the United States, 61.
Although Frank Thistlethwaite's 1961 essay “Migration from Europe Overseas in the 19th and 20th Centuries” (reprinted in A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930, ed. Rudolph Vecoli and Suzanne Sinke [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], 17–49) established this principle, the first focused investigation in this vanguard, which represented the seminal shift in practice, is Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” The Journal of American History 51, no.3 (1964): 404–17.
Sune Åkerman, “Theories and Methods of Migration Research” in From Sweden to America a History of the Migration, ed. Harald Runblom and Hans Norman (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1976), 19–75.
See also, for example, on West German migrants to Missouri, Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); on East Elbian migrants to Wisconsin, Uwe Reich, “Emigration from Regierungsbezirk Frankfurt/Oder 1815–93,” in People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1930, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagler (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1995), 79–100.
For a summary, see Douglass Massey, “Why Does Migration Occur? A Theoretical Synthesis,” in The Handbook of International Migration, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Joshua DeWind (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), 43–52.
Keeling, Business of Transatlantic Migration, 158.
Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German Emigration Research, North, South and East: Findings, Methods, and Open Questions,” in Hoerder and Nagler, People in Transit, 28.
Torsten Feys, The Battle for the Migrants: The Introduction of Steam Shipping on the North Atlantic and Its Impact on the European Exodus (St. Johns, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2013), 80–87; Torsten Feys, “Steam Shipping Companies and Transmigration Patterns: The Use of European Cities as Hubs during the Era of Mass Migration to the US,” Journal of Migration History 2, no. 1 (2016): 265.
Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial,” 172–73.
Feys, Battle for the Migrants, 84.
Ibid., 76–77, 85; Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung, 60–61; Drew Keeling, “Costs, Risks and Migration Networks between Europe and the United States, 1900–14,” in Feys et al, Maritime Transport, 118–22.
In particular William O'Reilly, “Non-Knowledge and Decision Making: The Challenge for the Historian,” in The Dark Side of Knowledge: Histories of Ignorance, 1400–1800, ed. Cornel Zwierlein (Boston: Brill, 2016), 397–419; Gil Epstein, “Herd and Network Effects in Migration Decision-Making,” Journal of Ethic and Migration Studies 34, no 4 (2008): 567–83.
O'Reilly, “Non-Knowledge,” 397.
Ibid.
Ibid., 397–98.
Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 21–22.
Günter Moltmann, Aufbruch nach Amerika: Friedrich List und die Auswanderung aus Baden und Württemberg 1816/17—Dokumentation einer sozialen Bewegung (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1979), 150.
Zahra, Great Departure, 50.
Ibid.
Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (London: Cornell, 2004), 32.
Ibid.
There had never been any intention by the British government to send German migrants to Carolina. Three thousand “Palatine” migrants were sent to New York in an ad-hoc plan to produce naval stores, around six hundred to Carolina, many Catholics returned to Europe, and the rest disbursed around the British Isles. On the confusing lines between state discussions of foreign settlers and the private interests of colonial governors in stimulating settlement, see William O'Reilly, “Strangers Come to Devour the Land: Changing Views of Foreign Migrants in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Early Modern History 21, no. 3 (2016): 153–87, and William O'Reilly, “Working for the Crown: German Migrants and Britain's Commercial Success in the Early Eighteenth-Century American Colonies,” Journal of Modern European History 15, no. 1 (2017): 130–52.
Epstein, “Herd and Network Effects,” 568–69.
Ibid., 569.
Ibid., 577.
Puskás, From Hungary to the United States, 61.
Feys, Battle for the Migrants, 80–81.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 86.
Jared N. Day, “Credit, Capital and Community: Informal Banking in Immigrant Communities in the United States, 1880–1914,” Financial History Review 9 (2002): 65–78.
“Conferences” were formed because the widespread network of agents on both sides of the Atlantic could take advantage of whichever lines were underbooked or under capacity, undermining shipowner's ability to fix prices for transatlantic transport. The British “conference” principally oversaw British, Irish, and Scandinavian migration but had an entry point to the Continental market through Hamburg and its transmigration service to Hull/Liverpool. The 1885 conference coordinating the prepaid market of Continental lines consisted of HAPAG, Lloyd, The Holland America Line (Rotterdam), and Redstar Line (Antwerp) and sought to control prepaid brokerage of German and central and eastern European movement. See Torsten Feys, “Prepaid Tickets to the New World: The New York Continental Conference and Transatlantic Steerage Fares 1885–1895,” Revista de Historia Economica 26, no. 2 (2008): 173–204.
Feys, “Transmigration,” 252.
Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung, 50.
Ibid.
Spitzer, “Pogroms,” 2.
Epstein, “Herd and Network Effects,” 569.
Keeling, “Costs, Risks and Migration Networks,” 121.
As well as the work of Michael Just and Torsten Feys, there has been a recent proliferation of essays on these issues. See for example Nicole Kvale Eilers, “Emigrant Trains: Jewish Migration through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880–1914,” in Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany and Britain, 1880–1914, ed. Tobias Brinkmann (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 63–84; Tobias Brinkmann, “Ellis Island an der Elbe? Die Entstehung der Hamburger Auswandererhallen und die osteuropäische Massenmigration in die Vereinigten Staaten 1880–1914,” in Die hanseatisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen seit 1790, ed. Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, Heiko Herold, and Claudia Schnurmann (Trier: Porta-Alba, 2017), 339–50; Rebekka Geitner, “Das größte Gasthaus der Welt? Die Auswandererhallen der HAPAG der Veddel in den Jahren von 1901 bis 1934,” in Hamme-Kiesow, Herold, and Schnurmann, Beziehungen, 309–38.
Feys, Battle for the Migrants, 91.
See the discussion of Gottfried Duden's Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas und einen mehrjährigen Aufenthalt am Missouri in den Jahren 1824 bis 1827, in Kamphoefner, Westfalians, 5–6.
Just, Ost- und südeuropäische Amerikawanderung, 55; Zahra, Great Departure, 23–65.
