Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Newly available in paperback, this edition is an important volume of international significance, drawing together contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field and edited by a team headed by the acclaimed historian David Richardson. The book sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery and addresses issues in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery, including African agency and trade experience. Emphasis is placed on the human characteristics and impacts of transatlantic slavery. It also opens up new areas of debate on Liverpool’s participation in the slave trade and helps to frame the research agenda for the future.

“What Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery offers is a close, careful and highly quantitative analysis of the multiple factors that contributed to Liverpool's ascendancy in turn shaped attitudes and aspirations both abroad and at home.”

Anyone seeking a clear, balanced and thoughtful presentation of the issues surrounding one of the most shameful episodes of human history could not do better than to arm themselves with a copy of this absorbing and well-edited book. Undoubtedly of use to anyone who has more than a passing interest in the role the African slave trade played in developing one of the Atlantic World's most prominent ports. This book is an important addition to the rapidly growing literature on the Atlantic slave trade. The volume is recommended to researchers and students interested in better understanding Liverpool's place in the history of British slavery and the slave trade. .. anyone seeking a clear, balanced and thoughtful presentation of the issues surrounding one of the most shameful episodes of human history could not do better than to arm themselves with a copy of this absorbing and well-edited book. This is a book of substance that offers both new insights and information, and which, at its best, contextualizes the city in its regional and its global context. As such, it enriches our understanding both of Liverpool's and Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave system. Liverpool and the Transatlantic Slave Trade will be undoubtedly of use to anyone who has more than a passing interest in the role the African slave trade played in developing one of the Atlantic World's most prominent ports. The essays in this volume stem from a 2005 conference on Liverpool and slavery held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The resulting collection often essays seeks to provide a current understanding of the relationship between Liverpool and slavery in the eighteenth century by building upon, and revising, the 1976 collection of essays, Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition, edited by Roger Anstey and Paul Hair. The biggest difference between these two collections of essays can be found in their titles as we see an evolution from the African Slave Trade to transatlantic slavery. It is this Atlanticization of Liverpool's participation in the slave trade that marks the divergence between the two volumes and that brings focus, and some tension, to the present volume. By viewing Liverpool's participation in an Atlantic context, the reader gains a fuller understanding of the larger consequences of this within Liverpool and its hinterland, West Africa and the Americas. In its attempt to explore the role of Liverpool in transatlantic slavery this work succeeds while demonstrating how the rise of Atlantic history as a field of inquiry has changed the questions being asked and the research being conducted on the eighteenth century. Within this volume are essays that build upon the traditional approach to the subject. These essays seek to explain why, after 1740, Liverpool came to dominate the British slave trade, the role that human capital, captains and crews, played in this, and, through several essays, a better understanding of the connections and consequences of Liverpool's participation in the slave trade upon the city and the region. The regional approach of several essays i\1ustrates the factors that contributed to Liverpool's continued growth and the importance of the slave trade in integrating this regional economy. These included the geographic advantages of Liverpool, such as its ability to acquire goods from Ho\1and critical for the slave trade, its relationship with not only the sea but also its hinterland, the availability of experienced captains and crews and a wi\1ingness of Liverpool slave traders to work to open new markets, both in West Africa and, as one essay shows, the Chesapeake, and to adapt to the customs and systems of the West African trading environment. This regional approach is then supplemented by three essays that take the co\1ection in a more Atlantic direction as they provide insight into the role of trust and credit in creating successful coastal transactions in West Africa, the growing stress on African ethnicities within studies of slavery, and the role of minor, rather than major, disembarkation points within Liverpool's se\1ing of slaves in the Americas. The final two essays, while strong in various ways, do not fit in as we\1 with the others. They do, in their examination of the Sierra Leone Company and abolition within Liverpool, mark an end to Liverpool's relationship to transatlantic slavery yet they do not bring any finality to the larger themes and issues developed within the work. The essays in the co\1ection provide a broad overview of the subject with some having a strong maritime focus and others not. What the essays do provide is a thorough introduction to the causes and consequences of Liverpool's participation in Transatlantic slavery. The essays by Kenneth Morgan, Stephen D. Behrendt, Melinda Elder, David Pope and Jane Longmore provide the reader with a clear and insightful understanding of the reasons why Liverpool became involved in the slave trade, the organization of Liverpool's slave trade and the consequences, both positive and negative, upon Liverpool and its environs. The other essays, by Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, Lorena S. Walsh, Trevor Burnard, Suzanne Schwartz and Brian Howman, illustrate the larger Atlantic consequences of Liverpool's participation in transatlantic slavery. Read together, the essays provide the reader with an introduction to the ways in which historians are exploring Liverpool's role in transatlantic slavery. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, edited by David Richardson (who worked on the slave trade data base with both David Eltis and Herbert Klein), Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbles is a very impressive set of essays, especially in its focus on quantitative methodology. Each contribution represents original research and addresses issues of concern in economic and business history. The first three essays, by Kenneth Morgan, Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, and Stephen D. Behrendt, stand as a set that seeks to explain Liverpool's dominance in the slave trade. They variously emphasize the importance of Liverpool's geographical location and its competitive spirit, particularly the innovative ideas that its business leaders developed about credit and networking with business partners in West Africa and Caribbean, which helped them make a place for themselves in a trade that until the mid-eighteenth century had been dominated by London and Bristol. The two chapters by Lorena Walsh and Melinda Elder focus on Liverpool's peripheral trade with the colonial Chesapeake and the Lancaster region in England, respectively. While both are very good studies, they tend to exhibit a problem that is the reverse of the one I identifiedin Herbert Klein's Atlantic Slave Trade: while Klein focuses largely on the numbers, ignoring the human element, Walsh and Elder tend to give too much attention to specific individuals. The chapters by David Pope and Jane Longmore stand out for providing an overview of the kinds of records historians can use to reconstruct the history of Liverpool's involvement in the slave trade. Pope, for example, who focuses on the social aspirations of Liverpool's slave merchants, includes four appendixes listing information found in the archives about specific merchants: whether or not they left wills or owned property outside of Liverpool, and what the values of their properties were. In including this material she makes it possible for students to understand how a number of disparate documents might be crossreferenced in order to detect how the wealth accumulated by Liverpool slave traders affected the region. Three of the essays-Trevor Burnard's discussion of African ethnicities in seventeenth-century Jamaica; Suzanne Schwarz's article on the development of the Sierra Leone Company; and Brian Howman's piece on abolitionism in Liverpool-are less directly connected to Liverpool and the slave trader per se. Yet these essays, too, contribute to on-going debates about cultural identities in the Americas, the role of commerce in the development of Sierra Leone, and the reason abolitionism took hold in Liverpool despite its centrality to Britain's slave trade, respectively. In that regard they are welcome additions, even if their inclusion in a book that focuses specifically on Liverpool and the slave trade seems rather curious. Together these three books highlight the continued vibrancy of studies on the slave trade and its abolition as scholars expand their research to focus on both the specific (in the case of Liverpool as a major slave trading port) and the international connections that both supported the trade and brought it to an end.

New in paperback, this important volume draws together contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field. The book sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery and addresses issues including African agency, trade experience, human characteristics and the impacts of transatlantic slavery, opening up debate on Liverpool's participation in the slave trade and helping to frame the research agenda for the future.

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