Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Reviews / Votes

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. * Urban History Journal * 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. * Journal of African History * This book is an important addition to the rapidly growing literature on the Atlantic slave trade. * American Historical Review * 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. * The Journal of African American History * .. 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. * Urban History Volume 35/3 * 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. * International Journal of African Historical Studies, Volume 41, Number 2 * 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. * H-Net Reviews * 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. * African History, Volume 49 * 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. * Internatioanl Journal of Maritime History, Volume XXIII, no. 1 *