The late nineteenth and early 20th century transatlantic core of migration business

In Europe, mass migration became economically and politically important with the emergence of powerful territorially-based states and developments in transportation, communication and industrialization that enabled Europeans to colonize and populate large parts of the rest of the world. “Cross-border migration,” Encyclopedia of Global Business

“Over three quarters of the present-day population of the Western Hemisphere are descended from people who crossed the Atlantic to move there during the last five centuries. This broad, diverse and long-lived human relocation helped to reshape the global economy.

“Atlantic Historic Migrations,” Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration.

“The relocation of Europeans across the Atlantic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the greatest and most thoroughly documented trans-oceanic migration of all time. It was a human drama, a major international demographic shift, and constituted a large-scale experiment in ethnic transformation during a period of unprecedented globalization...There was no crossing the Atlantic between 1900 and 1914 except on a ship...The 'Great Migration' across the Atlantic...was...a modern service business in which long distance transportation enterprises, a transnational labor market, sovereign control over border-crossing, and modern mass migration flourished and co-evolved…” Business of Transatlantic Migration, Introduction.