The Business of Relocating Stranded Americans and Belgian Refugees during the First World War

Abstract

This article provides a business perspective of the role of transport companies in directing transatlantic refugees during the First World War. It details the financial, administrative and logistical barriers that stranded Americans faced at the outbreak of the war. It discusses how authorities, NGOs and especially shipping companies organised the transportation of approximately 150,000 people in a matter of weeks along the well-oiled business networks which transported millions of migrants across the Atlantic. This is compared with the attempts to transfer Belgian refugees across the Atlantic throughout the war. Shipping companies used, in part, strategies similar to those of NGOs to gain authority in directing refugees, yet they saw them as a business opportunity which also explains the differences. It highlights that the dynamics between refugees, authorities, NGOs and transport companies shape migration policies, and argues that those companies should be integrated much more into migration governance studies. The article concludes that transport companies’ expert and logistical know-how made them indispensable actors in implementing migration policies, even when their business interests were severely threatened by wartime mobility restrictions.