Liverpool in the Atlantic World 1500-1833
- LAST MODIFIED: 21 February 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0383
- LAST MODIFIED: 21 February 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0383
Introduction
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.
Overviews
Despite Liverpool’s important role as the second city of empire, by the late 18th century there are surprisingly few modern overviews of Liverpool’s role in the Atlantic world. Ascott, et al. 2006 and Belchem 2006 were both published ahead of the city’s 800th birthday in 2007, but they are quite different in nature. The former, a co-authored work, not an edited collection, looks in detail at the early modern period, and while not about the Atlantic per se, covers it by default; the latter, an edited collection, has essays which cover the earlymodern period up to the present day with a few relevant chapters. Haggerty, et al. 2008, which looks at Liverpool from an imperial perspective, covers from the mid-18th century, but only Haggerty’s chapter covers the Atlantic specifically.
Ascott, Diana E., Fiona Lewis, and Michael Power. Liverpool 1660–1750: People Prosperity and Power. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006.
Really useful on the emergence of Liverpool as a port, its politics, institutions and main trading families.
Belchem, John, ed. Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006.
More about Liverpool itself than Liverpool in the Atlantic, but two chapters, one by Jenny Kermode, Janet Hollinshead, and Malcolm Gratton, and another by Jane Longmore give useful context.
Haggerty, Sheryllynne, Anthony Webster, and Nicholas White, eds. The Empire in One City? Liverpool’s Inconvenient Imperial Past. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Looks at the various ways in which Liverpool’s links with empire have often been difficult or forgotten. Includes chapters on trade with Jamaica and Irish immigration through the city.
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Article
- Abolition of Slavery
- Abolitionism and Africa
- Africa and the Atlantic World
- African American Religions
- African Religion and Culture
- African Retailers and Small Artisans in the Atlantic World
- Age of Atlantic Revolutions, The
- Alexander von Humboldt and Transatlantic Studies
- America, Pre-Contact
- American Revolution, The
- Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery
- Argentina
- Army, British
- Arsenals
- Art and Artists
- Atlantic Biographies
- Atlantic Creoles
- Atlantic History and Hemispheric History
- Atlantic Migration
- Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries
- Atlantic Trade and the British Economy
- Atlantic Trade and the European Economy
- Bacon's Rebellion
- Baltic Sea
- Baptists
- Barbados in the Atlantic World
- Barbary States
- Benguela
- Berbice in the Atlantic World
- Black Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
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- Cabato, Giovanni (John Cabot)
- Cannibalism
- Capitalism
- Captain John Smith
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- Castas
- Catholicism
- Cattle in the Atlantic World
- Central American Independence
- Central Europe and the Atlantic World
- Charleston
- Chartered Companies, British and Dutch
- Cherokee
- Childhood
- Chinese Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World
- Chocolate
- Church and Slavery
- Cities and Urbanization in Portuguese America
- Citizenship in the Atlantic World
- Class and Social Structure
- Climate
- Clothing
- Coastal/Coastwide Trade
- Cod in the Atlantic World
- Coffee
- Colonial Governance in Spanish America
- Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Colonization, Ideologies of
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- Communications in the Atlantic World
- Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- Confraternities
- Constitutions
- Continental America
- Cook, Captain James
- Cotton
- Credit and Debt
- Creek Indians in the Atlantic World, The
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- Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World
- Crowds in the Atlantic World
- Cuba
- Currency
- Death in the Atlantic World
- Demography of the Atlantic World
- Diaspora, Jewish
- Diaspora, The Acadian
- Disease in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas
- Dreams and Dreaming
- Dutch Atlantic World
- Dutch Brazil
- Dutch Caribbean and Guianas, The
- Early Modern France
- Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Economy of British America, The
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Elites
- Emancipation
- Emotions
- Empire and State Formation
- Enlightenment, The
- Environment and the Natural World
- Ethnicity
- Europe and Africa
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Northern
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Western
- European, Javanese and African and Indentured Servitude in...
- Evangelicalism and Conversion
- Female Slave Owners
- Feminism
- First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil
- Fiscality
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- Food
- Forts, Fortresses, and Fortifications
- France and Empire
- France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean
- France and the British Isles from 1640 to 1789
- Free People of Color
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- French Army and the Atlantic World, The
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- French Revolution, The
- Gardens
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- Gender in North America
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- George Montagu Dunk, Second Earl of Halifax
- Georgia in the Atlantic World
- Germans in the Atlantic World
- Giovanni da Verrazzano, Explorer
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- Great Awakening
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- Honor
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- Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World, Indian
- India, The Atlantic Ocean and
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- Insurance
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- Ireland and the Atlantic World
- Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)
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- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jesuits
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- Language, State, and Empire
- Languages, Caribbean Creole
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- Letters and Letter Writing
- Lima
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- Louverture, Toussaint
- Loyalism
- Lutherans
- Mahogany
- Manumission
- Maps in the Atlantic World
- Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
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- Maroons and Marronage
- Marriage and Family in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture in the Atlantic World
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- Medicine in the Atlantic World
- Mennonites
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- Mercantilism
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- Merchants' Networks
- Mestizos
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- Migrations and Diasporas
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- Morris, Gouverneur
- Music and Music Making
- Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World
- Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History
- Nation, Nationhood, and Nationalism
- Native American Histories in North America
- Native American Networks
- Native American Religions
- Native Americans and Africans
- Native Americans and the American Revolution
- Native Americans and the Atlantic World
- Native Americans in Cities
- Native Americans in Europe
- Native North American Women
- Native Peoples of Brazil
- Natural History
- Networks for Migrations and Mobility
- Networks of Science and Scientists
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- New York City
- News
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- Nineteenth-Century France
- North Africa and the Atlantic World
- Northern New Spain
- Novel in the Age of Revolution, The
- Oceanic History
- Oceans
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- Paris
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- Peru
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- Philadelphia
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- Piracy
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- Plants
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- Port Cities, French American
- Port Cities, Iberian
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- Portugal, Early Modern
- Portuguese Atlantic World
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- Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages
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- Proprietary Colonies
- Protestantism
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- Red Atlantic
- Refugees, Saint-Domingue
- Religion
- Religion and Colonization
- Religion in the British Civil Wars
- Religious Border-Crossing
- Religious Networks
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- Rio de Janeiro
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- Sailors
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- Spain, Early Modern
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- Technology, Inventing, and Patenting
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- Warfare
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