Borderlands in Motion: The Business of Labor Emigration from Austria–Hungary’s Eastern Periphery

Millions of people emigrated from Austria-Hungary between 1867 and 1918 across the Atlantic, with the easternmost crown lands of Bukovina and Galicia supplying a disproportionate share of the migrants. By the 1860s, the two provinces were well-connected to the rest of the empire through an expanding railway system, which facilitated travel to port cities in Western Europe and, ultimately, across the Atlantic. This newfound mobility coincided with deepening rural poverty and indebtedness, prompting many to seek opportunities abroad. Operating in a gray zone between legality and exploitation, emigration agents and businesses accompanied prospective emigrants on border crossings, arranged transport funding, and brokered deals with foreign governments eager for cheap labor. This paper examines how intermediaries who profited from and perpetuated labor migration - shipping companies like the Cunard Line, emigration agents like Bremen’s Friedrich Missler, and local salesmen who peddled ship tickets - drew rural migrants from Bukovina and Galicia into transnational systems of labor control, economic extraction, and imperial expansion. The mass exodus from Austria-Hungary’s eastern borders, I argue, was not simply a product of economic pressures; it was driven by the coercive, often exploitative mechanisms of the rising global emigration industry, which turned an imperial periphery in Europe into a reservoir of migrant labor for the New World.