<P> Between 1901 and 1907, White Star brought "The Big Four" (all around 24,000 tons) into service: Celtic, Cedric, Baltic, and Adriatic . These ships carried massive numbers of passengers: 400 passengers in First and Second Class, and over 2,000 in Third Class . In addition, they had extremely large cargo capacities, up to 17,000 tons of general cargo . </P> <P> In 1902 White Star Line was absorbed into the International Mercantile Marine Co . (IMM), a large American shipping conglomerate . Bruce Ismay ceded control to IMM in the face of intense pressure from shareholders and J.P. Morgan, who threatened a rate war . IMM was dissolved in 1932 . </P> <P> In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of people emigrated from Europe to Canada and the United States . White Star was among the first shipping lines to have passenger ships with inexpensive accommodation for third - class passengers, in addition to places for higher paying first - and second - class . The Oceanic - class liners of 1870--1872 carried up to 1,000 third - class passengers, as did the vast majority of White Star's ships thereafter . The White Star Line's "Big Four", a quartet of revolutionary liners which had large passenger and freight capacities, had the largest carrying capacity for third - class passengers: Celtic of 1901, with capacity for 2,352 third - class passengers; Cedric of 1903 and Baltic of 1904 each had a third - class carrying capacity of 2,000; the fourth ship, Adriatic of 1907, had a third - class carrying capacity of 1,900 . </P> <P> White Star advertised extensively for emigrant passengers . When the Line began operations in 1870, the majority of their business in the emigration trade was centred on Great Britain, and Irish emigrants remained a chief source of income for much of the company's history . From the start, a great deal of their business also came from Scandinavia, with Norway and Sweden being the largest areas of success . As the years passed, the company expanded its services into continental Europe, eventually tapping into the massive streams of emigrants from Italy, from the Slavic regions of Central Europe under the control of the Austro - Hungarian empire, and nations such as Romania and Bulgaria in southeastern Europe struggling with slowed economic growth and overpopulation . Also included was Europe's massive population of Ashkenazi Jews from several areas of Eastern Europe generally known as the Pale of Settlement, a region within the Russian Empire designated under anti-Semitic governmental policies as the only area in which Jews were allowed to settle permanently . The Line eventually expanded their services of travel across all regions of Europe, spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Middle East . No exact figures are available, but White Star liners may have carried as many as two million emigrants to North America . </P>

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