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Academic Research Fellowship Report - Richard Franke

Project title: Wrecking their hopes? – The Effect of Travel Risk Assessment on Migration Decisions

Awardee: Richard Franke

Year of award: 2024

Project description: An increasingly polarized political debate concerns the question whether search and rescue operations at sea act as a “pull factor”, i.e., whether they attract more migrants from across the sea by reducing the risk of the journey. Motivated by these circumstances, the project draws a parallel to the era of mass migration between Europe and the United States of America 1850–1920. It seeks to address a pivotal question: How does perceived travel risk influence emigration decisions and what role does the media play in this decision?

Thanks to the funding of the TRiSS Research Fellowship, the project benefited greatly from the support of a research assistant and two archival trips. I would like to thank Jack Egan for his outstanding contributions. He was pivotal in digitizing a list of over 12,000 shipwrecks from a printed source and in verifying the entries in the resulting database. In addition, Jack helped to structure information on available passenger lists and supported the exploration of further sources and archival material.

The funding also enabled two archival research trips to Liverpool and Bremen/Bremerhaven/Hamburg in 2024 and 2025, respectively. In Liverpool, for example, I accessed documents of steamship companies in the National Maritime Museum and consulted records on maritime births and deaths at the Liverpool Record Office. In Germany, visits to the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven and the state archives of Bremen and Hamburg provided access to further archival material from steamship companies and a broad range of related literature.

Overall, this funding facilitated an in-depth examination of available information on passengers involved in a maritime accident and possible limitations of the data. As such, it lays important groundwork for a future grant application to realise the full scope of the project.

A microfiche reader displays the first page of the Marine Deaths Register, 1880. Next to the reader, a box holds additional microfiche slides containing further pages. This photo was taken at the Liverpool Record Office.

Three original volumes from the general ledgers of the German Steamship Company Hansa, offering a detailed glimpse into 19th-century maritime commerce. This image was captured at the State Archive Bremen.