Immigration to America in the late 19th and 20th Centuries was a big business, large enough that J.P. Morgan was involved and millions of dollars could be made by funneling Europeans on large steamer ships across the Atlantic. In fact, over two million Jews traveled from Eastern Europe and Russia to escape persecution and search for a better life.
Steven Ujifusa's The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I chronicles the migration of Europeans in the decades preceding World War I and men who built large businesses and banked huge profits off the transport of those wishing to go to America. It also describes how America gradually turned insular and anti-immigrant due to a number of factors.
Ujifusa focuses much of the book on Albert Ballin, a Hamburg businessesman who was the managing director of the Hamburg-American line. Ballin created a sprawling network of trains and steamships to funnel migrants west. But his empire came crashing to the ground with the onset of World War I, as migration ceased and Europe and the North Atlantic turned into a war zone. Despite the war's end in 1918, immigration in America was severely restricted due to nativist and racist forces gaining influence in immigration policy.
The Last Ships from Hamburg is a great telling of the story of migration through Europe and to America but through the prism of how business in Europe helped in the mass migration.
MY RATING: 4.5
