The Market Structure of Shipping German Immigrants to Colonial America
B Y THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY the power of royally chartered trading companies to monopolize trans-Atlantic routes had waned. Within the confines of the Navigation Acts, eighteenth-century British shipping was openly competitive. However, the transportation of German immigrants from Rotterdam to America in the middle of the eighteenth century might have been the exception. Several authors have suggested that a few shippers monopolized this trade prior to the Seven Years War. Monopolization of the German passenger trade would have dire consequences for the emigrants. A monopolist's goal of higher profits