Liverpool in the Atlantic World 1500-1833

Abstract

Liverpool’s Atlantic history has been both marked and marred by its role as Britain’s leading slave trade port at the height of the British transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans between 1750 and 1807. For many years the slave trade was written out of Liverpool’s history in some form of purposeful forgetting. In the late 20th century, however, and especially with the rise of quantitative economic history, the trade in enslaved Africans has been written back into port city’s past. In the 21st century, the memorialization of the slave trade, including Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum has taken center stage. This element of Liverpool’s inconvenient past has meant that in popular history at least, Liverpool’s important role as a leading outport, especially in Atlantic trade, has often been obscured. During the 18th century alone Liverpool’s imports grew from 14,600 tons in 1709 to 450,000 tons in 1800. It population increased concomitantly over the same period, from 6,500 to 77,653. Liverpool’s trade with Ireland had long been significant, and it was an important jumping off point for the military expeditions to Ireland, but it also traded with the Mediterranean, all along the West African coast, Canada, the American colonies/states, and the British Caribbean islands. It also traded both legally and illegally with foreign powers in the Atlantic, including the French and Spanish colonies. Just about every type of commodity from all around Great Britain was exported through Liverpool around the Atlantic: manufactured and other goods, textiles, earthenware, barrels of flour and oats, Lancashire cheeses, candles, shoes, butter, fish, beef, and ironware, as well as coal and salt. In terms of imports, fish, flour, timber, tobacco, sugar, pimento, coffee, cocoa, dyewood, rum, pimento, and of course cotton among other items came through Liverpool’s docks – (in fact Liverpool was the first international cotton market). The city was also a significant financial center with good links to London and had several important banks (Arthur Heywood and Sons was later subsumed into Barclays and Leyland & Bullins eventually became part of HSBC). Liverpool also had a thriving finance and insurance market. Moreover, Liverpool was an important hub of privateering in wartime, a leader in the trade to South America in the early 19th century, retained important trade links with Western Africa after the abolition of the trade in enslaved Africans, and eventually became a leading port for emigration to the United States. Therefore while Liverpool was important for the slave trade, that slave trade was only one part of Liverpool’s important commercial activity in the Atlantic world.